Sarah Palin, the Christian Right and Fascism in America

Kniall said:
anart said:
Laura said:
"mysterious Nordic Covenant" anyone???

Complete with the current banking scandal...

...and the fact that Palin took to the stage at the RNC in Minneapolis

AND the next sentence in that list of 'prophecies' the C's gave is: "Evangelical sexual tryst exposed."

Ted "I'd-like-to-reassure-everybody-that-I'm-heterosexual...Well,-except-on-those-five-nights..." Haggard comes to mind

AND there was an unusually located 'earthquake' in and around Memphis earlier this year:

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/154777-US-Earthquake-in-Illinois-could-portend-an-emerging-threat

C's said:
Memphis feels
tremors. Minneapolis banking scandal relates to mysterious
Nordic covenant. Evangelical sexual tryst exposed.

Good catch, Kniall... put that together with Belibaste's post about the links between Joel's army, the Nazis, Knights, etc, and it's a potent mix. I think maybe we ought to revisit that little bit of text from the Cs in its entirety. Allowing for the fact that it was delivered 14 years in advance, and considering the fluidity of events, maybe it will at least give a general "feeling" for what's around us right now:

Cs said:
Ukraine
explosion; chemical or nuclear. Hawaii crash; aviation,
possibly involving military. More California seismic
activity after 1st of year: San Diego, San Bernardino,
North Bakersfield, Barstow: all are fracture points.
Hollister, Palo Alto, Imperial, Ukiah, Eureka, Point
Mendocino, Monterrey, Offshore San Luis Obispo,
Capistrano, Carmel: these are all stress points of
fracture in sequence. "Time" is indefinite. Expect
gradual destruction of California economy as people begin
mass exodus. Also, Shasta erupts; Lassen activity. Ocean
floor begins to subside. Leave channel open and pause:
Queen Elizabeth serious illness; blood related. Princess
Diana suicide attempt. Gas explosions this winter in NE
United States, Texas and other. Supernova and unusual
weather all over. Memphis feels tremors. Minneapolis
banking scandal relates to mysterious Nordic covenant.
Evangelical sexual tryst exposed. Gold is discovered in
California after one of the quakes. UFOs dramatic
increase and Gulf Breeze gets swarmed, becomes massive
"Mecca". Laura sees much more UFO activity. Huge wave of
UFO activity. All manner and origins. Just you wait, it
will give you chills and that feeling in the pit of your
stomach. Many aliens will appear and we will be visible
too. Think of it as a convention. All must awaken to
this. It is happening right now. The whole populace will
play individual roles according to their individual
frequencies. This is only the beginning. Just you wait
"Henry Higgins," just you wait!

And then, there's this:

Cs said:
15 Aug 98

Q: (L) Okay, now: I would like to know if there was a real
historic person behind the legend of King Arthur?
A: Close. Sorcerer's Coven. Secret pact of coven is
covenant.
Q: (L) Was this the Nordic Covenant behind the legend of King
Arthur?
A: Not really.
Q: (L) I think that implies that there might be a connection?
A: Maybe there is something more like an offshoot.
Q: (L) The Nordic Covenant is an offshoot of the Arthurian
Covenant or vice versa?
A: King Arthur story based on an offshoot of Nordic Covenant
Root.
Q: (L) Okay, now you say that the Nordic Covenant can be
positive or negative. Would the Arthurian Cycle be of the
Positive Offshoot?
A: Both.
Q: (L) What period of time did this Sorcerer's Coven...
A: During the "Dark Ages.
Q: (L) Can you get me closer to a year, or period of years?
A: We will let you do that.
Q: (L) The chief thing I noticed about this period of the
Dark Ages is that from the time of the 'birth of Christ,'
for about 1300 years, there is an incredible lack of
documentation. Now, there were some manuscripts written
by Monks, such as Gregory of Tours and so forth, but in
general, the only things that have survived from this
period are things put out by Monks under the control of
the church. It is as though the whole world became
illiterate. Is this, in fact, the case? Was it that
nobody was writing anything down during this period?
A: Close.
Q: (L) Was any part of this because of the control of the
Catholic Church over writing and education, and that they
opposed everything that did not support their views?
A: Close.
Q: (L) So, what we have to work with is what we have to work
with. And, I guess that's as close as we can get. It
isn't a whole heck of a lot. How many people were in this
Covenant?
A: Look for answers, trees will lead you to it.
Q: (L) What literary source could I go to to find the least
distorted or corrupted information?
A: Trees.
Q: (L) How long has this Nordic Covenant been in existence?
A: Look for it.

2 Jan 1999

Q: Well, let me get to some of these other questions. Previously you said that the central thing about the Nordic Covenant was that there were bloodlines that extend off the planet. From what I understand, all humans on the planet have bloodlines that extend off the planet. In what sense did you mean this about the Nordic Covenant; that the bloodlines extend off the planet?
A: Not all so recent, not all so "pure."


26 Dec 98

Q: How long has the Nordic Covenant been in existence?
A: 5129 years.
Q: Is the Nordic Covenant made between humans and other humans, or between humans and higher density beings?
A: Mostly between humans and humans, but some of the other.
Q: Does this Nordic Covenant exist on the earth today in similar format as it did at its inception?
A: Yes.
Q: Is this Nordic Covenant the same as you have referred to as the Quorum?
A: No.
Q: Would you say that the Nordic Covenant and the Quorum are in opposition, or just different?
A: Segmented relationship.
Q: Is there any particular thing about this that I ought to ask at the moment that I am not going to discover in the course of my research? The mail group asked a few questions about this, so I thought I ought to approach the subject. Is the Nordic Covenant made between people who are blond and blue-eyed?
A: Not the central issue.
Q: What is the central issue of the Nordic Covenant?
A: Bloodline extends off the planet.
Q: Is this Nordic Covenant a group that is in place on the planet for the purpose of guarding or propagating a particular bloodline?
A: To guard secrets.
Q: What does this secret have to do with a bloodline?
A: You should be able to figure this one out!
Q: Are these people with this bloodline and with these secrets the same ones involved with the genetic engineering of new bodies for the Lizzies to occupy at the point of transition to 4th density?
A: No.
Q: Are these secrets negative to our civilization or race?
A: From your perspective, maybe.
Q: Do these bloodlines have to do with Nephilim?
A: A little.
Q: What secrets are they guarding?
A: Your origins; the nature of your being.
Q: So, this Nordic Covenant is that which wishes to maintain the darkness of our realm, the time loops, the replays, and all that sort of thing?
A: One of the players, yes.

It's all pretty creepy and amazing at the same time.
 
What follows is a review of Chris Hedges' American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America published in the London Review of Books last year.

The author thinks Hedges is over-dramatic about the danger posed by the Christian Right Wing. But that was then. We know more now.

_http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n22/guya01_.html

LRB said:
Blackberry Apocalypse

Nicholas Guyatt – 15 November 2007

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America by Chris Hedges

Only a year ago, American evangelical Christians seemed more powerful than they had ever been. They had helped to re-elect George W. Bush in 2004, in spite of a rickety economy and the disastrous invasion of Iraq. They had waged a successful campaign in Washington to restrict access to late-term abortion. They had launched a series of ballot initiatives intended to prevent states or judges legalising gay marriage. And they had encouraged the Bush administration to appoint sympathetic justices to the Supreme Court. (In 2005, they secured their long-standing goal of a conservative majority on the court.) As the mid-term elections approached, worried liberals were warning that an American theocracy was just around the corner.

Then things started to unravel. When Americans went to the polls last November, both branches of Congress fell to the Democrats and the Republicans lost control of the House for the first time since Newt Gingrich’s triumph in 1994. Some of the religious right’s most loyal allies were vanquished. Tom DeLay, the former bug exterminator from Texas who had been a steadfast friend to evangelicals during his time as House majority leader, was dethroned in a corruption scandal before the election. The voters of Pennsylvania rejected Rick Santorum, perhaps the strongest voice for the evangelical agenda in the Senate, who had opposed gay marriage with unusual fervour. (In 2003, he told Associated Press that marriage should legitimate neither gay unions nor ‘man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be’.)

Meanwhile, one of the most powerful evangelical leaders in America, Reverend Ted Haggard of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, was caught up in a sex scandal. Haggard was a trusted adviser to the president on social issues and had drawn plenty of attention from skittish liberal journalists. Days before the November elections, a male prostitute from Denver told the press that Pastor Ted (who is married with five children) had paid him for sex on numerous occasions during the previous three years. Haggard had spiced up their encounters by taking crystal meth, his accuser claimed. To the amazement of evangelicals, Haggard admitted that he was a ‘deceiver’ guilty of ‘sexual immorality’. (He also admitted that he’d bought the drugs, though not that he’d used them.) He was fired from New Life and retreated for a period of spiritual contemplation, claiming that he was ‘completely heterosexual’.

And who replaced Haggard at the New Life Church? The man who said this:

"Since 2001, the body of Christ has been in the Second Apostolic Age. The apostolic/prophetic government of the church is now in place. . . . We began to build our base by locating and identifying with the intercessory prayer movements. This time, however, we feel that God wants us to start governmentally, connecting with the apostles of the region. God has already raised up for us a key apostle in one of the strategic nations of the Middle East and other apostles are already coming on board. Once we have the apostles in place, we will then bring the intercessors and the prophets into the inner circle, and we will end up with the spiritual core we need to move ahead for retaking the dominion that is rightfully ours."-- C. Peter Wagner

LRB continued said:
Things got worse. In May this year, Jerry Falwell, arguably the most influential evangelical of the last three decades, died suddenly of a heart attack in his office at Liberty University in Virginia. Falwell had founded Liberty in 1971 as a private religious college and it played an important role in nurturing Christian causes, from the pro-life movement to Bible prophecy. It was the more embarrassing, then, that a Liberty student was arrested at Falwell’s funeral with homemade bombs in his car. He told police he’d brought them just in case liberal protesters threatened the cortège.

Now, with Congress in the hands of the Democrats and the party’s leading presidential candidates raising record-breaking sums of money, Christian conservatives find themselves in an unenviable position. They don’t have a strong candidate for 2008 and aren’t keen on any of the Republican frontrunners. Rudy Giuliani was the mayor of New York City, Sodom to Las Vegas’s Gomorrah, and his Manichean view of the war on terror can’t make up for his pro-choice position or his other bracingly liberal views. (Giuliani camped out at a gay couple’s flat after he left his second wife and children in 2000, and he has made several public appearances in drag.) John McCain has shown himself to be unreliable on terror with his liberal-sounding objections to torture at Guantánamo and is too friendly to illegal immigrants. With Mitt Romney, it’s hard to know which is the more off-putting: that he served as governor of hippie Massachusetts or that he is a Mormon. Mike Huckabee, who was a Southern Baptist minister before he became governor of Arkansas, has cluttered his anti-abortion platform with liberal ideas about fighting poverty, protecting the environment and limiting the pay of corporate executives. Even the dark horse of the race, senator-turned-actor-turned-candidate Fred Thompson, has a liberal skeleton in his closet: his lobbying firm did work for pro-choice groups during the Clinton years. In 2000 and 2004, the religious right could rally behind a candidate who said, with apparent sincerity, that Jesus Christ had ‘changed my heart’. This time, the leading Republican candidates sound unconvincing when they court Christian conservatives – if they try to court them at all.

This gloomy picture of political decline will come as a surprise to those who have read any of the recent books attacking the religious right. At least half a dozen of these have appeared from major publishers in the last year: the list includes polemics by the likes of Kevin Phillips as well as alarmed reporting by American journalists like Salon’s Michelle Goldberg and Chris Hedges, who reported on Bosnia and the Middle East for the New York Times in the 1990s. Hedges’s thesis is simple: religious conservatives in the United States are incubating a form of fascism that could eventually destroy America’s political and intellectual traditions, exposing the nation and the world to a terrifying form of theocracy. He’s not the first to indulge in reductio ad Hitlerum as he bears witness to what’s going on in the megachurches: viewers of Richard Dawkins’s documentary The Root of All Evil? might remember his opening salvo against a pre-scandal Ted Haggard, in which Dawkins said that a New Life Church service reminded him of the Nuremberg rallies. (Haggard eventually chased Dawkins out of the church parking lot.) Hedges has a more sophisticated way of dealing with religious Nazis; he reprints a brief essay by Umberto Eco on ‘Eternal Fascism’ and, like other critics of the religious right, seizes on Sinclair Lewis’s line from the years of the Great Depression: ‘When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.’

According to Hedges, an evangelical movement in the United States is trying to establish a government based on scripture rather than the constitution. This movement, he argues, is not interested in dialogue or rational thought. It will distort, suppress or otherwise crush the opinions of its opponents. ‘It is not mollified because John Kerry prays,’ Hedges notes, ‘or Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday school.’ By the end of the book, Hedges is pleading with liberal readers to give up ‘naive attempts to reach out to the movement’. This is a call to arms: it’s time for liberals to meet intolerance with intolerance. After all, ‘this movement is bent on our destruction.’


The postwar revival of the religious right is one of the strangest stories in recent American history. In 1925, religious conservatives in Tennessee challenged the rising tide of secularism by enforcing state laws against the teaching of evolution in schools. The resulting trial of the pro-Darwin teacher John Scopes pitted the attorney Clarence Darrow against William Jennings Bryan, the ex-Populist and fervent evangelical. Bryan, who had been secretary of state in Woodrow Wilson’s first administration, was persuaded to take the stand as a witness for the truth of the Bible; Darrow delighted his captive audience of big-city reporters and East Coast intellectuals by making a mockery of Bryan’s heedless scriptural literalism. No matter that Scopes was convicted (though the verdict was overturned on appeal). Religious conservatives were laughed out of the cultural and political mainstream and the elder statesmen of the modern Christian conservative movement can still remember the advice of their mentors in the 1940s and 1950s: stay out of the dirty business of politics.

This attitude began to change in the 1960s, with a Republican uprising against the Democratic Party and the liberal intelligentsia. The rebellion broke out in the Sunbelt states of the Southwest and found expression in tough-minded Cold Warriors like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. With his strongly libertarian streak, Goldwater turned out to be a poor fit for the religious sensibility of the new movement and in the 1980s he delivered from the floor of the Senate some of the most vitriolic rhetoric ever uttered by a US politician against the religious right, even though its adherents had been central to the Sunbelt conservatism he pioneered. Nixon was readier to appease them, but the first presidential hero of the religious right was Ronald Reagan.

Ironically, it was the liberal thinking of Reagan’s predecessor, Jimmy Carter, that catalysed Christian conservatism on the national scene. Carter, a born-again Baptist from Georgia, had been maddeningly unreliable on social issues after taking office in 1977. He didn’t seem exercised by the Supreme Court’s pro-choice decision in Roe v. Wade, he put pressure on Israel to return land to Egypt and he was insufficiently bullish towards America’s godless Communist enemies. He even chose a humanist, Walter Mondale, as his vice-president. In the early 1970s, Christian leaders had started building the alternative networks of communication and scholarship that still define the evangelical movement: this was the moment when Christian television channels began to proliferate and ‘research institutes’ were established to promote creationism. But it was during Carter’s unhappy term in the White House that Jerry Falwell and others built the national political organisations that were to become the vehicles of the religious right. When Reagan was elected in November 1980, the long exile of evangelicals from Washington had come to an end.

It would be a mistake to imagine that the religious right has controlled American politics for the past quarter-century. Despite the present spate of books decrying a fundamentalist takeover of the Republican Party, there has been plenty for evangelicals to complain about even since the triumphs of Bush and Karl Rove. As Thomas Frank argued in 2004 in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, the striking thing about the Republican alliance with evangelicals has been the thinness of their legislative achievements: abortion is still legal, campaigners for gay rights have made real strides and the wall between church and state remains largely intact in American classrooms. Frank suggested that legislators had pulled off a confidence trick in their courting of evangelicals. The people who became Republican senators and congressional representatives in the 1980s and 1990s didn’t want to live in an America pockmarked by backstreet abortions or hate crimes: they talked the talk at election time but did very little in office to suggest they’d implement an evangelical agenda even if Republicans seized all three branches of government (which they did in 2005).

Times have changed: all those promises are being cashed in by the now powerful fundamentalists.

LRB said:
How to make sense of the contradiction between Frank’s analysis and the desperate alarm sounded by Hedges? In defence of Hedges, the grassroots efforts of Christian conservatives since 2004 have tested the idea that the separation of church and state is an unassailable principle in America. Those ballot initiatives attacking gay marriage were an unusually public sign of a more assertive Christian agenda; a good deal of work has been going on behind the scenes to advance the concerns of evangelicals and even to change the composition of the federal government so that conservative Christians are less reliant on the whims of elected officials. For example, the Justice Department has been quietly overhauled by evangelical appointees, to the point that civil rights laws are now regularly invoked to protect religious groups (Christian evangelicals, in the main) rather than racial minorities. The most troubling example, however, is the securing of a conservative majority on the Supreme Court with the appointment of Samuel Alito in 2005. The new court has already issued opinions on late-term abortion, affirmative action and campaign funding which have cheered religious conservatives, though whether the court will feel bold enough to overturn Roe v. Wade is another matter.

Still, I’m not sure that Hedges is right in his extreme assessment of the threat from religious conservatives or his hardline prescription for how liberals should counter it. For all their organising skills, squabbles and faultlines divide the would-be theocrats. Last year, as research for a book about Christians in the US, I spent a month talking to evangelicals who believe that the End Times are imminent. On my travels through the Bible Belt, I saw the San Antonio televangelist John Hagee accuse tens of millions of evangelicals of being ‘counterfeit Christians’, since they support preachers who sound ‘more like Dr Phil or Sigmund Freud than St Paul’. Tim LaHaye, doyen of the modern prophecy movement, told me that he took ‘vicious exception’ to Hagee’s suggestion that it might be easier for Jews to be saved by God than for other potential believers to win salvation. I heard Jerry Falwell attack a San Antonio rabbi for suggesting to the Jerusalem Post that Falwell went along with this line of thinking (the public denial was prompted by the Post’s screaming headline: ‘Falwell: Jews Can Get into Heaven’). And I heard just about everyone in the evangelical community attack Joel Osteen, pastor of America’s largest megachurch, for being too timid about his commitment to Christ in an appearance on CNN’s Larry King Live. Osteen has written a string of national bestsellers and his congregation in Houston has become so large that he’s converted the local NBA basketball arena into a church with 17,000 seats.

Beyond the personal rivalries and posturing of evangelical celebrities, there are deep divisions within the religious right, as there are among conservatives more generally, over political issues such as climate change and immigration. Pat Robertson, who is probably the country’s best-known evangelical now that Falwell has died, declared himself a ‘convert’ on the issue of global warming last summer, insisting that ‘we really need to address the burning of fossil fuels.’ Even on immigration, an issue that traditionally unites conservatives, the religious right has struggled to adopt a single position. Richard Land, the powerful Southern Baptist leader, joined with Ted Kennedy in March to promote reforms that would enable illegal immigrants to gain legal resident status; Joel Osteen and others offered their support. Savvy evangelicals have struggled with this issue because they recognise two competing conservative constituencies: the core of white Protestant evangelicals who have traditionally been hostile towards immigration, especially from Mexico and other Catholic nations in Latin America; and the tens of millions of Latino Catholics – citizens, legal residents and illegal aliens – who might be willing to ally with Protestant conservatives on some social issues, notably abortion.

The eagerness of some of today’s evangelicals to court Catholic immigrants would have horrified the religious conservatives of 19th-century America. As European immigration in the 1830s and 1840s brought millions of Catholics to the United States, mainstream Protestants joined Methodists and Baptists in complaining about lax border restrictions and permissive naturalisation laws. ‘Catholic Europe is throwing swarm on swarm upon our shores,’ the Presbyterian Lyman Beecher warned in an 1835 tract. Comparing the ‘tremendous tide’ to the ‘locusts of Egypt’, Beecher detected a conspiracy by the pope and the Catholic powers of Europe to bring down the American republic through a demographic revolution.

Only in recent decades has the religious right been able to overcome its aversion to the Catholic Church and the future of this new alliance will determine whether the nightmare scenario Hedges paints is realised. As the religious right has outlined its social programme, it has become increasingly dependent on Catholics to do the political and intellectual heavy-lifting. Until he dropped out of the 2008 presidential race last month, the most serious candidate for evangelicals was Sam Brownback of Kansas, a senator who left the Topeka Bible Church in 2002 and converted to Catholicism. On the Supreme Court, the five conservative justices are all Catholics.

The dependence of American Protestants on their oldest enemy suggests the intellectual fragility of the evangelical cause. Will Clarence Thomas or John Roberts allow the United States to become a theocracy? It’s possible, but very unlikely. Instead of worrying about such things, it would be more prudent to confront the immediate dangers to abortion provision and affirmative action presented by the new alignments of religious conservatism in America. Liberals might also look out for areas in which Catholic intellectuals and Protestant moderates are unwilling to march in lockstep with evangelical extremists. For example, along with a raft of conservative decisions, the Supreme Court also produced opinions that were attentive to the threat of climate change. Brownback may have let out a cheer from his desk when the Senate passed legislation outlawing ‘partial-birth’ abortion, but he has taken a liberal position on the immigration debate and has teamed up with Barack Obama and George Clooney to raise awareness of the violence in Darfur.

According to Hedges, we may be only one cataclysmic event away from a total reordering of American politics and a takeover by the theocrats. Many of the Christian conservatives I spoke to last year fully expect another 9/11, but their gloomy view of the future has more to do with Ezekiel than the Fox News Channel. According to recent polls, tens of millions of Americans believe that the apocalypse will take place in their lifetime. Prominent evangelicals have suggested that the End Times might have already begun with 9/11 and that in the short period before the return of Christ and the beginning of the millennium, there will be neither a pax Americana abroad nor a theocracy at home. Instead, true Christians around the world – and especially in the heartland – will be teleported to heaven and spared what follows. European nations will soldier on after the Rapture, since only a few of their citizens will disappear. But the United States will be devastated by the loss of so many good people and the most powerful nation on earth will fall by the wayside. The Antichrist will emerge and bring peace to the Middle East. He will unite the economies and governments of the world, including the former United States, and institute a new religion in which everyone worships him. For the seven years that follow – the Tribulation – those left behind after the Rapture will endure terrible torments if they defy their ungodly leader. Then Jesus Christ will return, the Antichrist will be routed, and the millennium will begin.

This scenario provides one of the most powerful ways for millions of American evangelicals to think about what lies ahead in world politics.
(Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series, a sequence of 16 apocalyptic novels which imagines the realisation of Bible prophecy in today’s headlines, has sold more than sixty million copies since 1995.) Not everyone has been seduced by the notion of the End Times; the so-called Dominionists, the bogeymen in Hedges’s book, are especially withering about apocalyptic Christians. Dominionists make up only a fraction of the evangelical movement but are the strongest proponents of theocracy. In their view, prophecy preachers encourage Christians to abdicate the project of fashioning a Christian society. Dominionists would very much like to see Deuteronomy as the law of the land, but they struggle to convince fellow evangelicals, who are waiting for the rise of the Antichrist rather than an American Moses.

The religious right should not be treated as a monolith; nor should it be assumed that its adherents are interested in the same political outcomes. It may be that the liberal obsession with theocracy rather than apocalypse has distracted attention from some of the threats posed by Bible prophecy enthusiasts, especially in the field of US foreign policy. While prophecy believers have tended to retreat from the political arena, or limit themselves to producing speculative treatises that map contemporary events onto Micah or Revelation, today’s apocalyptic authors and televangelists are much more engaged with the debates and personalities in Washington.

The veteran preacher Hal Lindsey tells his television audience to support Israel unconditionally, secures exclusive interviews with neocon favourite Benjamin Netanyahu and urges the US government to launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran. John Hagee has created a huge lobbying organisation to take the support-Israel/ bomb-Iran message directly to Congress and has told his followers that a US strike on Tehran may initiate the sequence of apocalyptic events related in Ezekiel 38 and 39. Joel Rosenberg, who used to work as a political consultant to Steve Forbes and Netanyahu, now tours the studios of CNN and Fox imploring Americans to take note of the danger from Iran and Russia (Ezekiel provides him with his intelligence about the threats). You can watch Hal Lindsey on America’s leading Christian TV networks. John Hagee’s recent book urging the US to attack Iran sold more than 700,000 copies in a few months. And Joel Rosenberg will send the latest Bible prophecy news to your Blackberry.

American Fascists, like many recent attacks on the religious right, assumes a unity of purpose and a level of organisation among evangelicals that just doesn’t exist.

...but now we know about the CNP:

Engdahl said:
Many of the religious evangelical groups in America are coordinated top-down by a secretive organization called the Committee on National Policy [...] created in the early 1980's during the Reagan era, [the CNP] is the nexus for several odd and quite powerful organizations. It was described by ABC's Marc J. Ambinder as 'the conservative version of the Council on Foreign Relations.'


[...]

Religious researchers Paul and Phillip Collins describe the CNP as follows:

'The CNP appears to be a creation of factions of the power elite designed to mobilize well-meaning Christians to unwittingly support elite initiatives. The CNP could also be considered a project in religious engineering that empties Christianity of its metaphysical substance and re-conceptualizes many of its principles and concepts according to the socially and politically expedient designs of the elite. These contentions are supported by the fact that many CNP members are also members of other organizations and/or criminal enterprises that are tied directly to the power elite.'

In order to shape public debate over the course of national military and foreign as well as domestic policy, the US establishment had to create mass-based organizations to manipulate public opinion in ways contrary to the self-interest of the majority of the American people. The Committee on National Policy was formed to be a central part of this mass manipulation.

The Committee on National Policy is a vital link between multi-billion dollar defense contractors, Washington lobbyists like the convicted felon and Republican fundraiser, Jack Abramoff, and the Christian Right. It's at the heart of a new axis between right-wing military politics, support for the Pentagon war agenda globally and the neo-conservative political control of much of US foreign and defense policy.

The CNP has been at the center of Karl Rove's carefully-constructed Bush political machine. Tom Delay and dozens of top Bush Administration Republicans are or had been members of the CNP. Few details about the organization are leaked to the public. As secretive as the Bilderberg Group if not more so, the CNP releases no press statements, meets in secret and never reveals names of its members willingly.


http://www.sott.net/articles/show/165864-The-Most-Dangerous-Cult-in-the-World-Sarah-Palin-s-links-to-the-Christian-Right

LRB continued said:
This still leaves the question of how to engage with biblical literalists and prophecy believers, especially when they lobby for more conservative legislation or insist that the White House reconciles its Middle East strategy with the Book of Daniel. In the past few months, Christopher Hitchens has been shouting at many of these people on conservative talk shows. Keith Allen, who travelled to Kansas earlier this year to make a Channel 4 programme about the founders of the ‘God Hates Fags’ website, ended up screaming ‘Fool!’ at his host. Hedges tells us that ‘debate is useless’ and warns that ‘tolerance coupled with passivity is a vice.’ It seems unlikely that any of this will encourage evangelicals to become more moderate.

Of course not. And that is Hedges' point. These people cannot be “encouraged” to see the error of their ways.

LRB said:
For the prophecy enthusiasts in particular, liberal invective merely fuels their belief that the great deceiver is on his way. A more productive strategy would be to note the faultlines among religious conservatives, to point out the inconsistencies (often scriptural) that confound even the most scrupulous literalist and to look for common ground with the majority of evangelicals.

Although it has hardly been a progressive force in American history, patriotism may yet be the lingua franca that enables liberals and religious conservatives to keep talking to each other. On my travels last year, I found little enthusiasm for a theocracy among conservative Christians. Although I invited evangelicals to disparage the separation of church and state, very few obliged. (One of my interviewees told me that Mitt Romney’s candidacy demonstrated why the United States benefited from a ‘secular government’.) Instead, America itself is an object of veneration and evangelicals still admire the constitution, the Founding Fathers, the legacy of popular presidents like Lincoln and Reagan and the achievements of Americans during the wars against Nazism and Communism. Tapping into this form of political religion comes with its own risks for liberals, not least since it encourages a blindness to the darker moments in American history. But I’m less convinced than Chris Hedges that patriotism and theocracy are natural bedfellows. It would take a good deal of home-schooling and curriculum revision – or a very large bomb – to upset the currents of American mythology, which lead away from a frigid theocracy and towards a soupy consensus of inclusion and liberty.

Hmm, a strangely prescient closing comment. Sarah Palin, it seems, is that “very large bomb.”

Of course, things have changed since the LRB article.

With their backs against the wall following 8 horrendous years of Bushism, the Republicans are bending over backwards to accommodate the Fundies:

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/165995-Who-Really-Told-McCain-to-Select-Sarah-Palin-or-Else-

NY Times said:
[This time around, McCain] allowed conservative organizers like Phyllis Schlafly to shape what many advocates say is the most conservative platform in the party's history. At Ms. Schlafly's behest, for example, the party approved an immigration plank calling for new laws to speed widespread deportations and other punitive measures at odds with Mr. McCain's stance on one of his signature issues.


To make up for a history of conflict with the Christian conservative wing of his party, Mr. McCain has in some ways gone further than Mr. Bush to reassure the right of his intentions, even at the risk of spooking more moderate voters.

"I am now more confident about a John McCain presidency than I am about a George Bush presidency," said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. "The campaign has courted conservatives aggressively, and it has turned around remarkably in just the last few weeks."


[...]

In Minneapolis, "it was as if the whole Republican convention had started drinking Red Bull," said Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, who added that when the McCain campaign had sought his input weeks before he had suggested picking Ms. Palin.


Yeah, Red Pit-Bull :evil:
 
Found an interesting blog post http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010593.html#010593 by a Teresa Nielsen Hayden. She collects the evidence that Palin is a narcissist. Doesn't use the term 'psychopath' but the evidence is there. Weird coincidence. On the page of that post is an ad for a book about Nefertiti!

Teresa Nielsen Hayden said:
Melanoma and narcissism
Posted by Teresa at 08:27 AM * 102 comments
Patrick, Jim, and Fragano say I’m doing it wrong, and that the long comment I posted in the thread following Jim Macdonald’s entry Obeying the Law Is for Wimps should have been a separate front-page post.

I can go along with that, though I’ll keep my original format. The first part of my essay, about John McCain’s melanoma, began as a response to Kelly McCullough (#24). The second half, about Sarah Palin’s personality disorder, was a response to Paula Helm Murray (#2). Jim Macdonald’s entry, the background to all this, is about a story on the McClatchy News website—Palin fires back in ‘troopergate,’ calls official insubordinate—and the descriptive chronology of Troopergate posted in the story’s comment thread by a reader who goes by “DobermanTracker.”

Just read. It’ll all come clear.

Kelly McCullough (#24): “I’ve got a third option. McCain and his vetting team are so incompetent he didn’t know (or understand) she was under serious investigation.

Kelly, I’ll take “Arrogance and Bad Vetting” for $600. Their vetting process seems to have only taken a few days, and to have been conducted from Washington and on Google. The centerpiece of it was a long questionnaire they went over with Palin in person.

I take their belief that Palin would self-report any problems as evidence that they didn’t know the woman. The same goes for expecting her to know what happened to Thomas Eagleton when he failed to report a lurking problem.

There are multiple reports from people in Alaska (big state, small community), and particularly people in the Alaskan government, who said they’d never been asked anything, and that they didn’t know anyone else who’d been asked either. In addition, one of the employees at the Wasilla newspaper (which is only partly available online) let drop that prior to Palin being named the Republican candidate for Vice President, no one had looked at the newspaper’s hardcopy archives in months

If you want to set yourself up for unpleasant surprises, that’s one way to do it.

For a different and grimmer take on McCain’s reasons for selecting Palin, check out Maggie Jochild’s John McCain: Dead Man Walking? at Group News Blog. She makes a good case for McCain having terminal cancer, an Après moi, le déluge attitude, and a deal with the Council for National Policy: the fundies give him their support, and he in turn accepts their hand-picked choice of his successor. A couple of quotes:

Last week, when I got the letter from Robert Greenwald talking about John McCain’s refusal to release his medical records to fair scrutiny, the fact that there are 1,000 pages of them (I create medical records for a living, 1,000 pages is EXTREME), and the news that he has had malignant melanoma, deep primaries with removal of lymph nodes, my immediate thought was “Then he’s dying.” If he were to be elected, he’d have an almost 2 out of 3 chance of having a recurrence if he doesn’t have one already. This is not the kind of cancer you count on escaping from. This is not Stage II, as it has been reported: Stage II by definition does not have lymph node involvement. By definition, it must be either Stage III or Stage IV.

At the beginning of this next section, Jochild is quoting an article by Kathy Geier:

“For years, releasing a candidate’s complete medical records has been standard practice for major party presidential candidates. The way the McCain has dealt with the medical records issue is highly unusual, to say the least. …f the medical records really were unproblematic, they wouldn’t hesitate to release the whole enchilada to any reporter who asked, with no conditions and no strings attached."


If he is in fact a Dead Man Walking, then the choice of Sarah Palin as Vice President also becomes more than a Hail Mary pass intended to destroy any bounce from the wildly successful Democratic Convention. It becomes reckless in the extreme: Choosing an heir apparent who lies, engages in petty revenge, wants to know how to ban books, faithfully attends a church which believes dinosaurs were around 4000 years ago and Jews are punished by God for not believing in Jesus, has less foreign policy experience than a Delta flight attendant, doesn’t know what the Bush Doctrine is, and has less than two years experience governing a state with a population less than that of Wichita, Kansas or Raleigh, North Carolina.

We know that the secret cabal, the Council for National Policy, who hopes to replace American democracy with religious rule (THEIR religion, not yours), are the people who investigated Sarah Palin and “chose” her for McCain as his VP. Since he accepted their decision, fundamentalist organizations have thrown themselves behind his campaign in a way they had not before. It raises the question of a deal: What would a dying man have to offer power brokers in order to have their backing for the U.S. Presidency?


I posted a comment in their thread (as is only polite):

f McCain were as chock-full of pride, integrity, and truth as he pretends to be, he would never have spoken to Bush again after the South Carolina primaries in 2000. What Bush did there was utterly dishonorable. Instead, McCain sulked for a while, then did a 180 and became the good little toe-the-line Bush supporter he never was before the 2000 race. It’s an easy guess that Bush promised to back him for the 2008 race. At this very moment, McCain’s organization is full of Bush’s old people.


There’s always that temptation to refer to them as Bushpeople, but it would be unfair to the real ones.

(If I were really speculating, I’d say the reason the Republicans have had Joe Lieberman on a string all these years was because he was promised the Vice-Presidency under McCain.)

Eight years of going down on his knees for Bush, Cheney, and their cronies must have irked the hell out of McCain. Whatever the truth of the matter, he’d put a lot of work into cultivating the appearance of integrity. Bush spent his reputation as recklessly as he spent Tony Blair’s, Colin Powell’s, and all the others. I can imagine McCain laboring to suppress his gag reflex while silently repeating his mantra to himself: “Shut up, go along with it, and you’ll get to be president.”

Then, after all those years of lip service, he discovered he wasn’t going to live long enough to collect his payoff. Such irony! Did he accept the news with resignation? Of course not. Are you kidding? McCain’s a senator, he’s the son and grandson of admirals, and he’s married to Arizona’s answer to Meadow Soprano. He never takes a fall if he can make someone else take it for him. (In this case, I think it was Joe Lieberman.)

So there it is: McCain thinks he’s got the presidency coming to him, and he’s damned well going to see that he gets it—no matter how much ruination it brings on the country he claims to love.

I won’t claim I conveyed any great insights, beyond “McCain has turned into something you’d fish out of Dubya’s private office wastebasket.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Paula Helm Murray (2): “Sounds like if they get elected, it will just be the same old same old. She sounds either dumber or more blindly self-centered than the Shrub. Or maybe both.

My instant reaction to the Troopergate chronology was that we’re looking at a clinical personality disorder, located somewhere in the immediate vicinity of narcissism. If I’m right, Palin is basically out of control, and unlikely to improve.

Have you ever dealt with a full-blown narcissist? “Self-centered” is too mild a description. They’ve got a weirdly information-deprived worldview; they can’t process criticism, failure, or noncompliance; and they have a constant need for external validation of their grandiose self-images. It can lead them to do amazingly stupid things.

What I immediately noticed was that Palin hasn’t bothered to keep track of the stories she tells. It’s not that she can’t; she’s not that stupid. Rather, it hasn’t occurred to her to do so. She isn’t thinking about other people’s reactions. That isn’t bad judgement, or an absence of judgement. It’s a pathological lack of interest in the subject.

Here are my comments on the Troopergate chronology that “DobermanTracker” posted at McClatchy:

* First she would not tell us (Anchorage, Alaska) why she fired Monegan

He was in a high-profile position; he’d already had a middlin’-distinguished career; Palin appointed him in the first place; when she fired him, she offered him another state job; and there just doesn’t seem to be much evidence of general dissatisfaction with his work, or of preexisting disagreements between Palin and Monegan that didn’t involve Wooten. It was bizarre of Palin to not realize she’d be expected to explain that, or that there might be repercussions. I’d expect a candidate for county dogcatcher to know better than that.

* Then, finally, she said she wanted to take the department in a new direction.

* Took forever (week at least) to get her to state what that direction was.

“Taking the department in a new direction” is not the same thing as “firing for cause.” It’s one of four unrelated issues Palin has cited as her reason for firing Monagan. She dropped the second one—that he was not adequately filling state trooper vacancies—after Monegan pointed out that the police academy was about to graduate its largest class ever. The third, that he wasn’t doing enough to fight alcohol abuse problems, is problematical in light of the fact that the state job she offered him at the time of his firing was Executive Director of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. The fourth, that he “did not turn out to be a team player on budgeting issues,” could mean anything. (Subsequent, equally meaningless accusations—viz., “egregious insubordination,” “obstructionist conduct”—are irrelevant to this discussion, since they were cooked up by the legal attack dogs the McCain organization sicced on the case.)

Oh, and Palin also said, early and often, that it had nothing to do with repeatedly pressuring him to fire her ex-brother-in-law, which she never did, and didn’t know about either.

Now, the thing about (1.) taking the department in a new direction, (2.) attracting more recruits, (3.) focusing more on alcohol abuse, and (4.) being a team player on budget issues, is that whether or not Monegan mishandled them (evidence: still not in evidence), they shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise to him when he first heard about them; i.e., after he was fired.

Those are all policy and structure issues. Any one of them would have required Palin to do a fair amount of talking and memo-exchanging with Monagan before she could even tell they were a problem, much less a problem on whose solution she and Monegan were irreconcilably opposed.

When you’ve got a guy who by all-but-one accounts was doing a good job, only you want him to take things in a different direction, the first thing you do is talk to him about taking it in a different direction. Firing him comes a lot later, after flurries of memos plus maybe a few F2F tiffs, tizzies, and scenes. By the time it finally happens, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.

Next point: what are the odds of anyone having four different large-scale administrative problems so serious that every one of them warrants firing him on zero notice, yet none of the problems are interrelated? It’s improbable, is what it is. Also, what are the odds that someone could be screwing up his job like that without pissing off an underling so badly that they’d be willing to talk about it to a friendly and understanding reporter? Should be news stories. Aren’t.

And one more bit about that “taking it in a new direction” thing. Palin replaced Monegan with Chuck Kopp, former police chief and acting city manager of Kenai. Whoops! Turns out Kopp had been suspended, investigated, and given a letter of reprimand by the City of Kenai for sexually harassing an underling. Kopp departed, clutching his $10,000 severance package. (Monegan got no severance.) Palin then appointed Joseph Masters, a former security director for a private petrochemical firm. Asked in an interview whether Gov. Palin had discussed her vision of the department with him before hiring him, Masters said “Gov. Palin didn’t give me any guidance or direction or mandates for the department.” It appears that Palin’s “new direction” is as unfindable as evidence of Monegan’s misdeeds.

Oh, who are we kidding? She didn’t fire him for cause. She ran out of patience one day with his continuing refusal to proceed illegally against her ex-brother-in-law, fired him, and only afterward realized that people would notice and have opinions about it. Even then, she didn’t realize that giving four or five different excuses would present a problem.

Every time I try to imagine Sarah Palin at work, what comes out of her mouth is Glory’s dialogue from Season Five of Buffy.

* Finally she said Monegan was not doing a good job of working on bootlegging in the villages and in recruiting new troopers—she forgot that 3 weeks prior to this announcement she had stated on TV news that he was doing a great job in both of these departments.

* She even stated she had offered him a job on the Alcohol Board (while firing him as commissioner) simply because he was doing such a good job in this area.

* Then, couple of days ago, she stated, he was not fired at all, that he quit.

“I did it in self-defense—and besides, I didn’t push him, he jumped. Furthermore, I can prove I was in another city when it happened.”

If you stack up too many stories, you eventually reach a point where they all fall over.

* Now, she is stating he was fired and it was because of “egregious insubordination.”

That’s one of the accusations cooked up by McCain’s people. If you don’t buttress it with details, all it means is “He didn’t do something I wanted.”

* She is asking the Personnel Board - 3 people appointed by Palin - to dismiss the ethics complaint which she filed against herself in order to get it before the Personnel Board - because some out-of-context e-mails sent to Monegan prior to his having been (fired/quit) “exonerate the Governor totally and completely, once and for all.”

The story gets complicated. I highly recommend the Wikipedia entry, Alaska Public Safety Commissioner dismissal: a first-rate piece of work that’s like a vision of what Wikipedia could be in a better world than this.

(Digression: an interesting subplot: If you read the whole entry, pay attention to how many of the charges and complaints made against Mike Wooten, the ex-brother-in-law, turned out to not amount to much; how few of them are based on testimony from people who aren’t close to Sarah Palin; and how much time passes between Wooten’s supposedly scary and threatening words and deeds, and the dates on which Sarah Palin and her sister Molly get around to mentioning them to anyone else. I’m not saying Mike Wooten is a suffering saint; I’m saying the case against him shrinks considerably when you examine it. Three under-reported facts: (1.) Part of the basis for Mike Wooten being made an Alaska State Trooper in 2000 was the fulsome character reference provided him by Sarah Palin. (2.) The Domestic Violence Protection Order (DVPO) granted Molly McCann (Palin’s sister) at the time she filed for divorce was later quashed because McCann’s counsel was unable to produce any evidence of acts of physical or implied violence. In fact, McCann told police at the time of filing that Wooten had never physically abused her. Sarah Palin has since lied about the episode, saying the DVPO was lifted after Wooten’s supervisors intervened. Both Palin and the McCain campaign have subsequently cited the DVPO as evidence that Wooten was violent towards Molly McCann. (3.) At the McCann/Wooten divorce trial,

a representative for the Alaska State Trooper’s union testified that the union viewed the dozen complaints filed by McCann and her family against Wooten as “not job-related” and “harassment”. Judge Suddock repeatedly warned McCann and her family to stop “disparaging” Wooten’s reputation or risk the judge granting Wooten custody of the children. At a court hearing in October 2005, Judge Suddock said “disparaging will not be tolerated - it is a form of child abuse … relatives cannot disparage either. If occurs [sic] the parent needs to set boundaries for their relatives.”)

(Another interesting subplot: Keep an eye on Todd Palin. The guy isn’t a state employee, but he accesses confidential files, sits in on personnel meetings, and generally works Sarah Palin’s will. Just yesterday he announced that he was also going to ignore his subpoena. If you think Executive Privilege is a shaky theory, try Executive Privilege by Marriage.)

Back to the main thread: The only reason Troopergate isn’t a bigger mess is that McCain sent a legal team to Alaska in order to obstruct justice. Once they were up and running, Palin’s words and deeds got a lot less random, ditto candid. Still, the uncontaminated pre-legal-team sample of her behavior is enough to establish that her emotional reactions are way off normal.

I’m going to bring up a touchy subject: the early reports suggesting that Trigg Palin is the son of Bristol rather than Sarah Palin. That was a nasty episode. Whose fault is that? Sarah Palin’s, first to last. She didn’t give birth to Trigg all alone in a cave. There have to have been multiple witnesses to the labor and birth. None of them could step forward without violating patient privacy. All Sarah Palin had to do was give a couple of them permission to say they’d been there, and that she was the mother.

But she didn’t do that. Why not? IMO, because it made her look like an injured party (she obviously enjoyed that, and got loads of mileage out of it), and drew attention away from the rest of her problems. The other consequence of leaving the story in play was that seventeen-year-old Bristol Palin got dragged through a cubic mile of mud, then paraded in front of the RNC on primetime television as a Moral Example. It’s fatuous to claim it was Bristol’s choice. Even grown men who have the law on their side would think twice before crossing Glorificus Palin; and Bristol is her resourceless minor child.

* She filed this complaint against herself because she felt the legislative committee investigation (10 Republicans and 4Democrates) is politically motivated even though the investigation was started before McCain selected her.

* There is another ethics complaint filed against her for “demonizing” Trooper Wooten. A judge —in the child custody case—hard warned Palin’s family that their constant attacks on Wooten were becoming a form of child abuse.

* During all this, Monegan stated he was pressured to fire Wooten while Palin denied ANY pressure from ANYbody was put on him I.E SHE HAD NO KNOWLEDGE OF ANYONE CONTACTING MONEGAN ON THIS ISSUE

Yup! All those people on her immediate staff, plus her husband, independently took it upon themselves to try to pressure the Alaska Public Safety Commissioner into firing Palin’s former brother-in-law from his job as a state trooper. That was amazingly brave of them, considering that one of the accusations McCain’s legal team has cooked up against Monegan is that he failed to get Palin’s explicit permission to petition the feds for additional funds for law enforcement.

As of this August, months and months after Troopergate started, Palin finally got around to saying “Pressure could have been perceived to exist, although I have only now become aware of it.” So, which is it? Liar, or incapable of running her own staff, much less anything bigger?

* Palin repeats her campaign promises of “open and transparent” governing policy—-while Poll by TV station shows 87% no longer think she is open and transparent—so much for the supposed 80% approval rating!

* Palin states, “Hold me responsible.” Regarding the legislative investigation, “Bring it on!”

A person with a normal sense of potential consequences would be more prudent at every step of the way.

* Legislature hires independent investigator

I believe this is the investigation the majority-Republican voted unanimously to undertake, long before Palin became McCain’s running mate.

* Palin suddenly has Atty General ( who, it ends up also pressured Monegan) start investigating and immediately finds phone call from her staffer Frank Bailey to Troopers - Bailey claims it was his idea and govenor had no input. He is put on PAID leave and remains that way today.

And survives to this day with no worse blemish on his honor than being the recipient of Sarah Palin’s approval.

* Seems approximately 24 contacts were made with Monegan, from Todd Palin, Bailey, Attorney General, other staffers and PALIN HERSELF.

Consider the implications. Sarah Palin had already fired Monegan on zero notice, denied him severance, publicly traduced him, and hired substandard replacements to fill his position. He had absolutely no reason to cover for her. On top of that, he’d had many years of administrative experience, and he’d been aware for some time before he was fired that Palin and her staff were pressuring him to take improper action in re Mike Wooten. Of course he’d be keeping a record of these contacts.

I take it as further strong evidence of a grandiose and unrealistic worldview, and an abnormal absence of basic human empathy, that Palin didn’t expect this story would come out.

* Despite having previously denied anyone contacted Monegan ( Todd did so in the Governor’s office !) Palin states these contacts did NOT constitute pressure on Monegan.

If they weren’t intended as pressure, why were they made at all? If Palin and her staff are in the habit of taking completely ineffectual actions, she’s too incompetent a manager to hold important positions.

* Palin has done nothing but refuse to cooperate with legislative investigation and now states she will not submit to questioning, i.e. she is “totally and completely exonerated” by Monegan’s supposed “egregious insubordination.”

Nope. First, even if she (or rather McCain’s legal team) has come up with decisive evidence in her favor, everyone still has to observe the normal legal procedures. Having the evidence may curtail those procedures, but the system still has to establish (to variable levels of precision) what happened, who did what to whom, and which rules (if any) were violated. (Note: this is a very rough description.) Palin’s evidence can then be examined in that context. She doesn’t get to declare that her evidence is so good that it doesn’t have to be looked at. That’s like saying you’ve been dealt such a killer Bridge hand that you should just be awarded maximum points without playing out the round.

Second, as I’ve already pointed out, “egregious insubordination” is close to meaningless if you don’t establish what that insubordination consisted of, the state of understanding between Palin and Monegan, and whether his actions were in fact egregious. This is not going to be established without going through normal or near-normal procedures, and Palin is going to have to be involved.


If she’s so incapable of taking responsibility for her actions that she can’t even answer for herself at a state-level inquiry, she’s not fit for high office. Leaders take responsibility. It’s part of the basic spec.

* While Palin makes public the selected e-mails to Monegan, she illegally witholds other e-mails (there is legal action to obtain them) which may show her direct and intentional participation in the pressuring of Monegan to fire Wooten.

After all these successive instances of the story coming out, she still thinks the next part of the story won’t come out.

You can’t have it both ways. Either the woman is so stupid that Dan Quayle has to phone her long distance to tell her to come in out of the rain, or she’s wired wrong for assessing and predicting the consequences of her actions, and how others will react to them.

One more datum and I’ll quit for now. This is a parallel story, like Troopergate writ small:

Palin Fired Aide Who Dated Wife of Todd’s Friendhttp://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/09/palin_fired_aide_who_dated_wif.php

The Politico reported Friday that a longtime associate and former gubernatorial aide to Sarah Palin says he was asked to leave the governor’s office after the Palins discovered that he was dating the soon-to-be-ex wife of a close friend of Todd Palin.

Let’s get this straight. Todd Palin isn’t a government employee. He’s just the spouse. A buddy of his is being divorced by the buddy’s wife. A longtime aide of Sarah Palin’s was dating the soon-to-be-ex wife. I assume Todd Palin’s buddy felt bad about that. Result: the aide got fired.


This behavior wouldn’t pass muster in a junior high school student council.

John Bitney, who grew up in Wasilla with Palin, told the paper cum website:

I wanted to stay with the governor and support the governor—we’re talking about someone who’s been a friend for 30 years—but I understood it, and I have no ax to grind over the whole thing.”

He’s been her political ally and full-time aide. He’s been her friend for thirty years. Now he’s out in the cold, and unemployed, because he dated the former main squeeze of a friend of Todd Palin? Yeah, I’ll bet he has no hard feelings.

I think we should start keeping track of this kind of unnatural docility in people who’ve been screwed over by Sarah Palin. I think they’re afraid of her.

Today, the Wall Street Journal added more to the story, reporting that seven weeks after publicly praising Bitney, Palin fired him for what her spokeswoman now describes as “poor job performance.”

That’s not just mean-spirited, vindictive, and mendacious; it’s stupid. Any organization is going to generate a few disgruntled ex-employees—it’s inevitable—but you have to try to keep their number as low as possible, because they can be dangerous to your operation. It’s especially important to avoid publicly humiliating them and/or rendering them unemployable, because it leaves them with nothing to lose, and a lot of time to think about it.

When you make a habit of arbitrarily praising your employees one month and firing them another, you also screw up relations with the rest of your staff, because there’s no way for them to feel secure. Some will leave. The others will spend more time and energy worrying about where they stand with you than they do on their actual jobs.

During that time, Palin had found out from Scott Richter, a friend of Todd Palin’s, that Richter’s wife, Debbie, was having a relationship with Bitney.

And what does this have to do with the business of the State of Alaska? Absolutely nothing.

The Journal notes that Palin’s office seems to have had trouble keeping its story straight on the reason for Bitney’s departure.

At the time, the governor’s office cited “personal reasons” for Mr. Bitney’s “amicable” departure, according to contemporaneous news reports.

“He wanted to spend more time with his family” is the usual line.

Last week, Sharon Leighow, a spokeswoman for the governor’s office, said “John Bitney was dismissed because of his poor job performance.” She declined to provide further details.

Months into Troopergate, they still haven’t learned to keep their mouths shut.

If you go back to the original story on Politico http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20080905/pl_politico/13190, things get even weirder:

WASILLA, Alaska—While Sarah Palin’s supporters tout her personal warmth and openness, the newly minted Republican vice presidential nominee can be brusque to allies, advisers and employees who fall from her favor.

Palin has unceremoniously ended relationships with an aide who was dating a family friend’s soon-to-be ex-wife, a campaign adviser whose mother-in-law fought Palin’s legislative agenda, a local political mentor who she felt represented the “old boys’ network,” a police chief who she said tried to intimidate her with “stern look” and a state commissioner who refused to fire her sister’s ex-husband.


When she first became Mayor of Wasilla, she fired so many employees that she had trouble getting information on how things had been run:

After upsetting the three-term incumbent Wasilla mayor in 1996, Palin quickly eliminated the position of one city department director and asked five others for a letter of resignation, a résumé and a letter explaining why they should be retained.

Though five of the six department heads had supported her opponent, John Stein, Palin insisted the housecleaning was not politically motivated. Only two directors kept their jobs and one of them — city planner Duane Dvorak — left on his own eight months later.

“After all the excitement, I kind of felt like the ax could fall any time and just never felt like the situation warmed up,” said Dvorak, who had worked for Stein for more than two years and is now a planner for the far away Kodiak Island Borough.

Dvorak, who did not back either Stein or Palin, recounted being asked to brief the new mayor and her top aide on a wide variety of topics related to the city and state codes “that really didn’t have a whole lot to do with planning. But because they let everyone else go, they didn’t have anyone else to call on,” he said. “It’s one thing to take the city in a different direction and try to work with the staff that you have and maybe make a few key changes over time, but to just precipitously let people go and then restaff — it didn’t go over well.”

One of Palin’s biggest and most expensive snafus as mayor was building a hockey rink on land to which the town didn’t fully hold title. If she thought she didn’t need the people who knew how things were run, she was wrong.

What kind of crazy do you have to be to start your term as mayor by firing almost everyone who could help you do your job?

See also Albert Bernstein’s The Smartest, Most Talented, All-Around Best Person in the Universe Test, a.k.a. The Narcissistic Vampire Checklist, and Joanna M. Ashmun’s Narcissistic Personality Disorder website.

 
With so many skeletons in the closet, I wouldn't be surprised to see dead bodies, sooner or later. :/
 
Vulcan59 said:
With so many skeletons in the closet, I wouldn't be surprised to see dead bodies, sooner or later. :/

Well, here's one, sort of:

Mean girl: Sarah Palin uses "old boys" then dumps them

David Talbott
Salon
Tue, 23 Sep 2008

Sept. 23, 2008 | WASILLA, Alaska -- Before Sarah Palin decided to run for the Wasilla mayor's office in 1996 against incumbent John Stein, the Palins and Steins were friends. John Stein had helped launch Palin's political career, mentoring the hockey mom during her 1994 run for City Council, along with veteran council member Nick Carney. Stein's wife, Karen Marie, went to aerobics classes with Palin.

But when she announced her candidacy for Stein's seat, vowing to overturn the city's "old boy" establishment, a different Sarah Palin emerged. "Things got very ugly," recalled Naomi Tigner, a friend of the Steins. "Sarah became very mean-spirited."

The Wasilla mayor's seat is nonpartisan, and Mayor Stein, a former city planner who had held the post for nine years, ran a businesslike campaign that stressed his experience and competency. But Palin ignited the traditionally low-key race with scorching social issues, injecting "God, guns and abortion into the race -- things that had nothing to do with being mayor of a small town," according to Tigner.

Palin's mayoral campaign rode the wave of conservative, evangelical fervor that was sweeping Alaska in the '90s. Suddenly candidates' social values, not their ability to manage the roads and sewer systems, were dominating the debate. "Sarah and I were both Republicans, but this was an entirely new slant to local politics -- much more aggressive than anything I'd ever seen," said Stein, looking back at the election that put Palin on the political map.

There was a knife-sharp, personal edge to Palin's campaign that many locals found disturbing, particularly because of the warm relationship between Palin and Stein before the race.

"I called Sarah's campaign for mayor the end of the age of innocence in Wasilla," said Carney.

Even though Palin knew that Stein is a Protestant Christian, from a Pennsylvania Dutch background, her campaign began circulating the word that she would be "Wasilla's first Christian mayor." Some of Stein's supporters interpreted this as an attempt to portray Stein as Jewish in the heavily evangelical community. Stein himself, an eminently reasonable and reflective man, thinks "they were redefining Christianity to mean born-agains."

The Palin campaign also started another vicious whisper campaign, spreading the word that Stein and his wife -- who had chosen to keep her own last name when they were married -- were not legally wed. Again, Palin knew the truth, Stein said, but chose to muddy the waters. "We actually had to produce our marriage certificate," recalled Stein, whose wife died of breast cancer in 2005 without ever reconciling with Palin.

"I had a hand in creating Sarah, but in the end she blew me out of the water," Stein said, sounding more wearily ironic than bitter. "Sarah's on a mission, she's an opportunist."

According to some political observers in Alaska, this pattern -- exploiting "old-boy" mentors and then turning against them for her own advantage -- defines Sarah Palin's rise to power. Again and again, Palin has charmed powerful political patrons, and then rejected them when it suited her purposes. She has crafted a public image as a clean politics reformer, but in truth, she has only blown the whistle on political corruption when it was expedient for her to do so. Above all, Palin is a dynamo of ambition, shrewdly maneuvering her way through the notoriously compromised world of Alaska politics, making and breaking alliances along the way.

"When Palin takes credit for knocking off the old-boy network in Alaska, it drives me crazy," said Andrew Halcro, an Anchorage businessman and radio talk show host who ran against her in the 2006 GOP primary race for governor. "Sarah certainly availed herself of that network whenever it was expedient."

With its frontier political infrastructure and its geyser of oil money, Alaska has become as notorious as a third-world petro-kingdom. In recent years, scandal has seeped throughout the state's political circles -- and at the center of this widening spill is Alaska's powerful patronage king, Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, and wealthy oil contractor Bill Allen.

Despite Palin's reform reputation, she has maintained a delicate relationship with Stevens over the years -- courting his endorsement for governor, then distancing herself after his 2007 federal indictment on corruption charges, and then cozying up again when it appeared he might survive politically. As for Allen -- the former oil roughneck whose North Slope wealth has greased many a palm in Alaska -- Palin found nothing wrong with his money when she ran for lieutenant governor in 2002.

But once a powerful patron becomes a major liability, Palin is quick to jettison him. Alaska state Rep. Victor Kohring, another key Palin supporter during her political rise in Mat-Su Valley, found this out after he became a victim of the FBI's oil corruption sting operation. Kohring, who used to accompany Palin on her campaign jaunts, angrily points out that he was abandoned by his fellow Christian conservative before he even went to trial. The former Alaska legislator, who now resides in the Taft minimum security prison outside Bakersfield, Calif., communicated his views of Palin through his friend, Fred James. Kohring, said James, feels "betrayed" by Palin.

"After Vic's indictment, she didn't give him the time of day," said James. "She never went to him personally and asked if the charges were true. This is a man who helped her get started in government. She turned her back on him well before he even went on trial. Vic resents the hell out of that. He thinks she's an opportunist, pure and simple. She saw how the press were moving on Vic, and even before he had his day in court, she called on him to resign his office. He regarded that as a great insult, a personal betrayal."

Palin's reputation as a reformer stems primarily from her headline-grabbing ouster of state GOP chairman Randy Ruedrich from the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission for flagrant conflict-of-interest abuses. At the time, Palin was heralded in the press as a whistle-blower, but it was later revealed that she was guilty of the same charge that she had brought against Ruedrich -- using state office equipment for partisan political business. (While still mayor of Wasilla, she sent out campaign fundraising appeals from her office during her race for lieutenant governor.)

Others suspect that Palin had self-serving reasons for taking on Ruedrich and resigning her seat on the commission. The state energy panel had ignited a public firestorm in Palin's home base, Mat-Su Valley, by secretly leasing sub-surface drilling rights on thousands of residential lots to a Colorado-based gas producer. Outraged farmers and homeowners, who woke up one morning to find drilling equipment being hauled onto their land, were in open revolt against the commission. While Palin initially supported the leasing plan, she was shrewd enough to realize it was political suicide to alienate conservative property owners in her own district. According to some accounts, she was also growing tired of commuting to state offices in Anchorage and poring over dry, tedious technical manuals for her job. All in all, it seemed like the right move to jump ship -- and going out a hero was an added plus.

"Sarah quit the commission to make political hay," Halcro asserted.

In the end, Ruedrich admitted wrongdoing and settled the ethics case by paying $12,000 in civil fines. But Palin did not drive the well-connected Republican operative into exile. In fact, he remains the party's state chairman and he could be seen on the floor of the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn., hugging the newly crowned vice-presidential candidate and cheering her feisty speech against greedy old boys like, well, him.

"The idea that Sarah shook up the state's old-boy network is one big fantasy, it's complete bullshit," Halcro said. "She got all this public acclaim for throwing people who backed her under the bus -- but she only did it after they became expendable, when she no longer needed them.

"The good old boys in Alaska are still the good old boys -- they're alive and kicking. Randy is still running the Republican Party -- he wasn't happy about being turned into a national poster boy for corruption, but he went along with the program. Ted Stevens is still running for reelection. And [scandal-tainted Alaska Rep.] Don Young is, too. So where's the new era of change that Palin supposedly brought to Alaska?"

SOTT Comment: What kind of person lies chronically and uses people for selfish purposes then discards them?

I think we know the answer to that...
 
Cs said:
Ocean floor begins to subside.

Might be a stretch, but I wonder if that is is related to this:


New climate change threat: Arctic seabed releases millions of tons of methane into atmosphere

Arctic scientists discover new global warming threat as melting permafrost releases millions of tons of a gas 20 times more damaging than carbon dioxide

The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.

The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats. (...)
 
Something interesting I noticed, maybe it has been mentioned already.

When looking into the similarities and differences of the “trial run” in Germany and the rise of Hitler, compared to current situation in u$a with Sarah “barracuda” I see a an interesting "coincidence".

I can’t help notice that Sarah “Plain” is an “outsider” of mainland u$a, in that not only she is from Alaska but she participated in a separatist group and tells people how she is an Alaskan first, and an American second.

Hitler was an “outsider” from Austria, and was a “simpleton” to the general German people. The very fact that she is a “born again” shows that she is seen as a “simpleton” among the general American people, and just like Hitler’s critics and the opposition of his day, Sarah’s critics and the demoKrats ridicule her and underestimate her.

Damn, I never thought I would say this, but looks like Bush & Co ARE the lesser evil this time. Now that’s scary!

Also on a side note, anyone else remember an episode of the Simpson’s were homer accidentally is thrown in a past timeline, messes with the past and in the future Flanders becomes the ultimate ruler of the world. At the time I laughed, but now... pass me a sick bag.
 
http://www.publiceye.org/eyes/promkeep.html

One of the main goals of The Promise Keepers, which is an organization connected to the Christian Right, is to prepare and coach Christian men to take their "rightful place" in the home. Just as God's position is at the very apex of creation, so too must Christian men stand in the place of God in the home with the wife not equal, but subservient, to the husband.

So if Sarah Palin is part of this movement, why is she, and not her husband, on the Republican ticket for Vice President?

Why isn't the Christian right screaming that she, as a woman, is not in her "rightful place"?

Why isn't her husband ordering her to get back home and take care of little Trig et al.?

In the face of all the The Promise Keepers stand for, [I mean stand against] why a woman and not a man?

Christian Soldiers http:
or Theocracy
By Russ Bellanthttp:

Promise Keepers is a rapidly growing Christian men's movement that in 1994 rallied about 300,000 men, filling six football stadia in colorful displays of male "spiritual renewal." The group's plan to double the number of participants and stadium events in 1995 seems realistic. Promise Keepers events in Detroit and Los Angeles in the early part of 1995 drew over 72,000 each. While projecting an image of spirituality, leaders of Promise Keepers seem to be bent on gaining social and political power. In the world of Promise Keepers, men are to submit to a cell group that in turn is closely controlled by a national hierarchy. Most important, women are to submit absolutely to their husbands or fathers.

Promise Keepers may be the strongest, most organized effort to capitalize on male backlash in the country during the 1990s. Conceived by University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney in 1990, Promise Keepers says men should "reclaim" authority from their wives--to whom they have supposedly ceded too much. Bill McCartney's goal in 1990 was to fill a sports stadium with Christian men to exhort them into his philosophy. The following year, he attracted 4,200 men to a basketball arena; 22,000 men came to Boulder's Folsom Stadium in 1992, followed by 50,000 men in 1993. Promoted by powerful elements of the Religious Right, Promise Keepers filled six stadia in 1994; the largest event was in the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis, which drew 62,000 men. The only women present were custodians and concession stand workers.

Don't Ask, Take
The manifesto of the movement is Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper, a book published for the group by James Dobson's organization, Focus on the Family. Evangelist Tony Evans, in his contributing essay, explains how to deal with women.

"I can hear you saying, `I want to be a spiritually pure man. Where do I start?' The first thing you do," Brown explains, "is sit down with your wife and say something like this: `Honey, I've made a terrible mistake. I've given you my role. I gave up leading this family, and I forced you to take my place. Now I must reclaim that role.' Don't misunderstand what I'm saying here. I'm not suggesting that you ask for your role back, I'm urging you to take it back." [Emphasis in the original.]

While insisting to male readers that there is to be "no compromise" on authority, he suggests that women readers submit for the "survival of our culture."

Total Submission
While serving as an assistant football coach at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Bill McCartney encountered and was deeply influenced by the Word of God (WOG) community. McCartney has said that

WOG leader Jim Berlucci is one of the two men who most influenced his life. WOG, a select and insular group of about 1,600 adults, practiced "shepherding/discipleship," which required total submission to a person called the "head." Members were required to submit their schedules in advance and account for every hour of every day. Marriage partner, movie choices, jobs, and other decisions also had to be approved by this leader.

Members who questioned authority, or women who questioned their extreme submission to men, were subject to often traumatic "exorcisms." WOG members were trained to see the world with suspicion and contempt--as an enemy. They believed that they were specially chosen by God to fight the Antichrist. When McCartney was hired by the University of Colorado, WOG introduced him to the WOG-linked "Vineyard" church, which has a parish in Boulder. Vineyard churches emphasize "signs and wonders" and "prophecy." Vineyard leader John Wimber calls their work "power evangelism" and describes his followers as "self-conscious members of God's army, sent to do battle against the forces of the kingdom of darkness." "One is either in God's Kingdom," Wimber insists, "or Satan's."

The Purpose of War
McCartney's pastor at the Boulder Valley Vineyard, Rev. James Ryle, whom McCartney says is the other major influence in his life, conducts a "prophetic" ministry and participates in conferences with men who claim to be prophets in the first-century sense of the term. Ryle believes Promise Keepers, of which he is a board member, is the fulfillment of the Biblically prophesied end-time army described in the Book of Joel--a terrifying army from which there is no escape. "Never have 300,000 men come together throughout human history," he declared, "except for the purpose of war." He says he has a vision of Promise Keepers purging America of secularism, which he considers "an abortion" of godliness.

Ryle spoke in 1994 at a secret Colorado conclave to plan anti-gay/lesbian electoral strategies. He said, "America is in the midst of a cultural revolution, which has poised our nation precariously on the brink of moral chaos, which is caused by what I am referring to as the crisis of homosexuality."

While Promise Keepers is not a political force in its own right in 1995, McCartney leads by example. He has repeatedly attacked reproductive rights, and he campaigned for the 1992 anti-gay Amendment 2 ballot initiative as a member of the board of Colorado for Family Values, the sponsor of the initiative. His rally addresses have been uncompromising. "Take the nation for Jesus Christ," he directed in 1992. The following year he said, "What you are about to hear is God's word to the men of this nation. We are going to war as of tonight. We have divine power; that is our weapon. We will not compromise. Wherever truth is at risk, in the schools or legislature, we are going to contend for it. We will win."

No less militant is Promise Keepers co-founder Dave Wardell, who told The Denver Post, "We want our nation to return to God. We're drawing a line in the sand here. . . . There has already been controversy about abortion and homosexuality. I hope there won't be any physical confrontations. . . . "

Something Like Punching Your Lights Out
Promise Keepers' national staff has grown rapidly from a handful in 1990 to 150, with a $22 million budget in 1995. But its significance is primarily at the local and church levels.

Promise Keepers urges men to form "accountability" groups of no more than five members, within which they are expected to submit all aspects of their lives to review and rebuke. Each member must answer any probes concerning his marriage, family, finances, sexuality, or business activity.

Such cells, usually operating within a church or para-church group, are led by a "Point Man" who answers to an "Ambassador" who reports to headquarters in Boulder. Decisions about local or state activity are ultimately made in Boulder.

"All of our success here is contingent upon men taking part in small groups when they return home," Promise Keepers spokesman Steve Chavis told Christianity Today. Less elegantly, Dave Wardell, the national coordinator for local leaders, explains, "I can go home and maybe still be the same guy after a conference. But if I have another guy calling up, holding me accountable, asking, `How are you treating your wife? Are you still cheating on your income taxes? Are you looking at your secretaries with lust?' it makes a difference. I don't think a woman would get in my face, go toe to toe with a guy, whereas a guy could tell me, `I don't like it. And if you don't listen to me, I'll punch your lights out.' Something like that."

These principles and structure, which are similar to the shepherding/discipleship model of the Word of God, would take years to implement and introduce a highly disciplined group. Most men drawn to Promise Keepers have probably never heard of shepherding/discipleship (which, in 1995, was still not widely known even within the evangelical community) and may be deeply offended if they experience the degree of manipulation and control (to which they may be "submitting" themselves and their families) that has occurred in many shepherding/disciple situations.

Trojan Horses?
Top Christian Right leaders in 1994 joined Dobson in promoting Promise Keepers. These have notably included Pat Robertson of the Christian Coalition and 700 Club, D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries, and Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ.

Dobson, who along with Robertson, Kennedy, and Bright, is a member of the secretive, reactionary-right Council for National Policy, is a central figure in Promise Keepers. Not only is he the publisher of the main text of the movement, he is a featured speaker at Promise Keeper events, which in turn sell tapes of his speeches.

Focus on the Family's network of political action groups, called Community Impact Committees, function much like Promise Keepers' cell groups within conservative churches. Largely invisible to individuals outside these churches, these committees are organized at the state and regional levels and controlled from Colorado.

Both Dobson's Community Impact Committees and the Promise Keepers cells are potential Trojan horses within churches and denominations, creating conflicting loyalties and lines of authority.

Leaders of Promise Keepers, in particular, come out of a movement that sees denominations as inhibiting evangelism and revivalism. Indicative of this is its use of Strang Communications to publish New Man magazine. Strang's Charisma magazine is contemptuous of traditional denominations. The senior editor of Strang's New Ministries magazine, Jack Hayford, is also on the board of Promise Keepers.

Promise Keepers scheduled more than a dozen rallies for purity, fidelity, and possibly social and political dominion in 1995. Promise Keepers had planned for over a year to draw one million men to a march in Washington, DC, just prior to the November 1996 elections.

Though postponed, the plans were evidently modeled after the Christian Right rallies called Washington for Jesus, which had similar backing and were held during the presidential elections in 1980 and 1988. Considering the high-level backing by the leadership of the Christian Right, and the anti-democratic views of Promise Keepers' leaders, this movement ought not be underestimated.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Russ Bellant is a Detroit-based author whose books include Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party: Domestic Fascist Networks and Their Effect on US Cold War Politics (South End Press, 1991) and The Coors Connection: How Coors Family Philanthropy Undermines Democratic Pluralism (South End Press, 1991). He was a founding member of the Public Eye network. This article first appeared in Front Lines Research, Vol. 1, Number 5, May 1995 issue. Footnotes appeared in the original and can be ordered through Political Research Associates. Copyright 1995, Russ Bellant.

What comes to mind here is "The -satiation professional- of Babylon" which makes an appearance before the end of days. Sarah Palin's behavior in using and discarding the men who helped her in her rise to power may be seen to be a type of metaphorical prostitution.

My Serbian friend told me that while watching the Republican convention, she was very much taken aback when the song "Barracuda" was played. I don't know if it would violate forum rules to provide the translation given by my friend, but perhaps there are enough clues below to make a translation unnecessary.

The -satiation professional- of Babylon, from The Apocalypse, 1498
Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528)
Woodcut; 15 5/8 x 11 1/4 in. (39.5 x 28.6 cm)
Rogers Fund, 1918 (18.65.8)
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/durr/ho_18.65.8.htm


By 1498, Dürer had published more than two dozen prints, which brought him to the attention of artists and connoisseurs not only in his native Nuremberg and other German-speaking areas but also across the Alps in Italy. It was the prodigious woodcuts of The Apocalypse, however, published in 1498, that made him enormously famous. There was a long tradition of Apocalypse illustrations in manuscripts, which continued in printed books, but nothing like Dürer's galvanizing imagination had ever been brought to bear on the text. In previous printed Bibles, illustrations had been put on pages along with the words, but Dürer gave precedence to the image, taking the entire large page of what he himself called a "superbook" for each of his fifteen subjects. This last image in the series marks the appearance of the -satiation professional- of Babylon in the Book of Revelation (17:3–4): "And I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast, full of names of blasphemy with seven heads and ten horns. The woman was garbed in purple and scarlet, and gilded with gold, gems, and pearls, and bearing a golden goblet in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication." Babylon, the domain that embodies evil on earth, burns with huge explosions of flame and smoke in the distance and from the upper left come the armies of heaven, led by the knight Faithful-and-True.
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/durr/ho_18.65.8.htm

This seems to correspond to the September 3rd session with the C's.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Open full-size image

 
Well, men gaining control of women's reproductive rights is a surefire way to insure that their psychopathic offspring will be brought to term and launched into life on this planet to make things worse.
 
Yep, and when dealing with psychopaths, remember that they use ideologies/movements/religions/ for their own purposes - they don't abide by anything but their own drives and destruction ...
 
If the fundies have their way, it will be open season on raping women and producing little psychowhack kids.
 
Vulcan59 said:
With so many skeletons in the closet, I wouldn't be surprised to see dead bodies, sooner or later.

Sarah Palin meets with three mass murderers in New York...Oh, I forgot, mass murderer
seems to be the primary qualification for the Presidency of the United States.

Nikolas Kozloff said:
_http://www.counterpunch.org/kozloff09242008.html

A Tutorial from Uribe
Palin at the UN

Since John McCain picked her as his running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has been widely criticized by the media for her lack of foreign policy experience. A politician from a remote U.S. state, Palin has shown little interest in travel—she obtained her first passport just last year.

This week the McCain team is trying to dispel the notion that Palin is a foreign policy lightweight. The Alaska Governor is slated to meet with a handful of foreign leaders during the General Assembly meeting of the United Nations. The roster of leaders chosen by the McCain camp bodes badly for U.S. foreign policy should the Republican ticket win in November.

Latin America ought to be a high priority for any new administration in Washington. But the only line in Palin’s Latin America résumé is a vacation to Mexico. And when world leaders arrive for the UN summit, Palin’s only meeting with a Latin American leader will be with Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, whose government has the worst human rights record in the entire region.

In an ongoing scandal, Colombia’s judicial system has arrested 29 members of congress and ordered investigations into 39 more for suspicion of collaborating with paramilitary death squads. Almost all of those implicated in the scandal are members of Uribe’s governing coalition. The president's former intelligence chief is even accused of feeding information to the paramilitaries to help them target and kill labor and human rights activists.

Uribe's own cousin, Senator Mario Uribe, was forced to resign in an effort to avoid a Supreme Court inquiry into whether he had paramilitary ties. The president and his cousin have been close political partners for decades. Álvaro Uribe has not been directly implicated in the scandal, but the president has long been dogged by accusations that paramilitary groups used his family’s farm to attack opponents in the 1990s.

The announcement of the Uribe-Palin meeting came just hours after the Colombian leader met with president George Bush. Uribe has been feverishly promoting his Colombia-U.S. free trade agreement in Washington. The Colombian government has paid more than $1 million to U.S. firms that have negotiated or lobbied in favor of the deal.

McCain has praised the Colombian government for prosecuting the drug war and making “substantial and positive” progress on human rights. Contrasting himself to his presidential opponent Barack Obama, McCain expressed support for the pending trade deal with the South American country.

The Huffington Post notes that McCain’s Colombia policy is informed by “a bevy of advisers who have earned large amounts either lobbying for the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, or representing corporations that do business with that country.”

The trade deal has been facing an uncertain future on the Hill. Many Democrats have opposed the initiative because Colombia’s labor and human rights record remains atrocious. Currently, the agreement is in legislative limbo since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi moved to indefinitely postpone consideration of the agreement.

The McCain campaign has also lined up Palin to receive some schooling in New York from a right-wing U.S. foreign policy stalwart. The Alaska governor will be chatting with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, an infamous Cold Warrior figure that is famous in Latin America for being the architect of U.S. destabilization of democratic Chile in advance of General Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup.

Previously, Palin was simply oblivious and uncurious about other foreign countries. But now, as she leaps on to the international stage, she stands to have a tremendous impact on the world—for the worse.
Currently, South America is exploding and a McCain-Palin administration will only exacerbate regional tensions. Bolivia is on the verge of civil war and president Evo Morales recently expelled the U.S. ambassador for meeting with members of the political opposition. Coming to the aid of an ally, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez followed suit by also expelling the U.S. ambassador in his country.

McCain is an implacable foe of Morales and Chávez and would like to isolate the so-called leftist “Pink Tide” in South America by cultivating links to the right-wing Uribe government in Bogotá and promoting free trade with sympathetic governments.

A McCain-Palin administration would also be turning to Latin America at a time when the region is once again becoming a global flashpoint for tensions between the United States and its global “enemies.” U.S.-Russian tensions, for instance, took on a new dimension when Venezuela and Russia began joint naval exercises in Caribbean waters. McCain’s hawkish foreign policy stance would likely make these tensions worse. (For more on the story, see my recent, "The Next Cuban Missile Crisis?”).

All of this is of apparently little concern to Palin, who also plans to meet with Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili in New York. Recently, Georgia fought a brief border war with Russia and received key political and diplomatic backing from both the Bush White House and McCain over the course of the conflict. Palin's New York meetings with unsavory leaders like Uribe and Saakashvili suggest that the McCain camp is intent on ratcheting up a new global standoff with Russia. By following McCain’s reckless lead on foreign policy, Palin would make the world less safe.

Photo of Sarah Palin's intimate handshake with Henry Kissinger.
http://newshopper.sulekha.com/photos/slideshow/Others/4/427789.htm
 
Sarah Palin mail account hacked

I was not sure if i should put it here ,if so , then please move to existing threads.

Some guys "hacked" Sarah Palin mail box week ago.
I just wanted to post the links to ongoing cases around this event.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080923/ap_on_el_pr/palin_hacked
http://project1337.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/no-indictment-in-palin-hacking-case/

interesting thing is that they are trying to make a punishment example of a learning kid.

"Experts said the hacker apparently left an easy trail for investigators"

it is obvious that this kid was just playing around but they still imply that it was a "hack" for purpose
 
Even Newsweek has taken notice

See article by Sam Harris: When Atheists Attack
_http://www.newsweek.com/id/160080
 
Sarah "Evita" Palin, the Muse of the Coming Police State

I've never read such an emotionally raw article as this one, from Naomi Wolf. She states that her essay is meant to "scare you to death", and it certainly strikes fear in MY heart. Now might be a good time to review the 10 steps necessary for a state to take control of individuals' lives that Wolf introduced in her book The End of America:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy.
2. Create secret prisons where torture takes place.
3. Develop a thug caste or paramilitary force not answerable to citizens.
4. Set up an internal surveillance system.
5. Harass citizens' groups.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release.
7. Target key individuals.
8. Control the press.
9. Treat all political dissidents as traitors.
10. Suspend the rule of law.



___________________________________________________________________

The Battle Plan II: Sarah "Evita" Palin, the Muse of the Coming Police State
Naomi Wolf
Huffington Post
Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:19 EDT

Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah "Evita" Palin. You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state.

You have to understand how things work in a closing society in order to understand "Palin Power." A gang or cabal seizes power, usually with an affable, weak figurehead at the fore. Then they will hold elections -- but they will make sure that the election will be corrupted and that the next affable, weak figurehead is entirely in their control. Remember, Russia has Presidents; Russia holds elections. Dictators and gangs of thugs all over the world hold elections. It means nothing. When a cabal has seized power you can have elections and even presidents, but you don't have freedom.

I realized early on with horror what I was seeing in Governor Palin: the continuation of the Rove-Cheney cabal, but this time without restraints. I heard her echo Bush 2000 soundbites ("the heart of America is on display") and realized Bush's speechwriters were writing her -- not McCain's -- speeches. I heard her tell George Bush's lies -- not McCain's -- to the American people, linking 9/11 to Iraq. I heard her make fun of Barack Obama for wanting to prevent the torture of prisoners -- this is Rove-Cheney's enthusiastic S and M, not McCain's, who, though he shamefully colluded in the 2006 Military Tribunals Act, is also a former prisoner of war and wrote an eloquent Newsweek piece in 2005 opposing torture. I saw that she was even styled by the same skillful stylist (neutral lipstick, matte makeup, dark colors) who turned Katharine Harris from a mall rat into a stateswoman and who styles all the women in the Bush orbit --but who does not bother to style Cindy McCain.

Then I saw and heard more. Palin is embracing lawlessness in defying Alaskan Legislature subpoenas --this is what Rove-Cheney, and not McCain, believe in doing. She uses mafia tactics against critics, like the police commissioner who was railroaded for opposing handguns in Alaskan battered women's shelters -- Rove's style, not McCain's. I realized what I was seeing.

Reports confirmed my suspicions: Palin, not McCain, is the FrankenBarbie of the Rove-Cheney cabal. The strategy became clear. Time magazine reported that Rove is "dialed in" to the McCain campaign. Rove's protégé Steve Schmidt is now campaign manager. And Politico reported that Rove was heavily involved in McCain's vice presidential selection. Finally a new report shows that there are dozens of Bush and Rove operatives surrounding Sarah Palin and orchestrating her every move.

What's the plan? It is this. McCain doesn't matter. Reputable dermatologists are discussing the fact that in simply actuarial terms, John McCain has a virulent and life-threatening form of skin cancer. It is the elephant in the room, but we must discuss the health of the candidates: doctors put survival rates for someone his age at two to four years. I believe the Rove-Cheney cabal is using Sarah Palin as a stalking horse, an Evita figure, to put a popular, populist face on the coming police state and be the talk show hostess for the end of elections as we know them. If McCain-Palin get in, this will be the last true American election. She will be working for Halliburton, KBR, Rove and Cheney into the foreseeable future -- for a decade perhaps -- a puppet "president" for the same people who have plundered our treasure, are now holding the US economy hostage and who murdered four thousand brave young men and women in a way of choice and lies.

How, you may ask, can I assert this? How can I argue, as I now do, that there is actually a war being ramped up against US citizens and our democracy and that Sarah Palin is the figurehead and muse for that war?

Look at the RNC. This is supposed to be McCain's America. But you see the unmistakable theatre of Rove's S and M imagery -- and you see stages eight, nine and ten of the steps to a dictatorship as I outlined them in The End of America. Preemptive arrest? Abusive arrest? "Newly released footage, which was buried to avoid confiscation, shows riot cops arresting and abusing a giant group of people for nothing."

Journalists were arrested -- for reporting. Amy Goodman and ABC producers were arrested. Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake and others were forced to lie face down as armed agents tied their hands behind their backs. The riot police wore the black S&M gear of the Rovian fantasy life and carried the four foot batons cops carry in North Korea. All this is not John McCain's imagery or strategy: it is Karl Rove's.

In McCain-Palin's America, citizens who are protesting are being charged as terrorists. This means that a violent war had been declared on American citizens. A well known reporter leaked to me on background that St Paul police had dressed as protesters and, dressed in Black -- shades of the Blackshirts of 1920 -- infiltrated protest groups. There were also phalanxes of men in black wearing balaclavas, linking arms and behaving menacingly -- alleged "anarchists." Let me tell you, I have been on the left for thirty years and you can't get three lefties to wear the same t-shirt to a rally, let alone link arms and wear identical face masks: these are not our guys. Agent Provocateurs framing protesters and calling protest "terrorism" constitutes step ten of a police state:

"In what appears to be the first use of criminal charges under the 2002 Minnesota version of the Federal Patriot Act, Ramsey County Prosecutors have formally charged 8 alleged leaders of the RNC Welcoming Committee with Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism... [they] 7 1/2 years in prison under the terrorism enhancement charge which allows for a 50% increase in the maximum penalty."

"Paid, confidential informants... infiltrated the RNCWC on behalf of law enforcement. They allege that members of the group sought to kidnap delegates to the RNC, assault police officers with firebombs and explosives, and sabotage airports in St. Paul. Evidence released to date does not corroborate these allegations with physical evidence or provide any other evidence for these allegations than the claims of the informants. Based on past abuses of such informants by law enforcement, the National Lawyers Guild is concerned that such police informants have incentives to lie and exaggerate threats of violence and to also act as provocateurs in raising and urging support for acts of violence."

Under the Palin-Rove police state, you will see escalating infringements on your access to a free internet:

"Sarah Palin was baptized at Wasilla Assembly of God...Last Sunday our research team released a video, a ten-minute mini-documentary, focusing on the Wasilla Assemblies of God and the video seemed on the verge of a massive "viral" breakthrough when YouTube pulled it down, citing 'inappropriate content'. At the point the video was censored by YouTube it had been viewed by almost 160,000 people. The short of it is that YouTube has censored a video documentary that appeared to be close to having an effect on a hard fought and contentious American presidential election..."

Under the coming Palin-Rove police state, you will witness the plans now underway to bring Iraqi troops to patrol the streets of our nation. This is not McCain's fantasy: it is Rove's and Cheney's.

Under the Palin-Rove police state, there will be no further true elections. Mark Crispin Miller has done sensational and under-reported investigating t o establish that -- as I warned -- indeed the GOP staffers on the US Senate Judiciary Committee have been .

The evidence is also buried on the Website of the Majority House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

WASHINGTON -- Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe. From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.

-- "Senate panel's GOP staff spied on Democrats" By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | January 22, 2004

Do you think that spying like this will ever end under a Palin-Rove regime? Dream on. If she and McCain are elected, then every single strategy memo and speech and debate prep note from every opposition candidate from now and on into forever will be read by the regime in power while it is still in the computers of the challengers.

Under the Palin-Rove police state, citizens will be targeted with state cyberterrorism. Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda, a former Reagan official, warned me three years ago that the Bush team went after a Republican who had crossed them through cyberstalking: they messed with his email, messed with his phones and I believe messed with his bank account -- he became a cyber-pariah, unemployable and haunted. With modern technology, there really is less place to hide from the state than there was in East Germany in the Cold War era. I remember feeling a chill: of course. That is the wave of the future once we breach the protections around citizens of FISA and the fourth amendment. That way lies the abyss for us all.

Am I trying to scare you? I am. I am trying to scare you to death and ask you to scare your Republican and independent friends most of all. How do you know when it is war on citizens? When there are mass arrests, journalists are jailed, the opposition is infiltrated, rights are stripped and leaders start to ignore the rule of law.

Almost everyone I work with on projects related to this campaign for liberty has been experiencing computer harassment: emails are stripped, messages disappear. That's not all: people's bank accounts are being tampered with: wire transfers to banks vanish in midair. I personally keep opening bank accounts that are quickly corrupted by fraud. Money vanishes. Coworkers of mine have to keep opening new email accounts as old ones become infected. And most disturbingly to me personally is the mail tampering I have both heard of and experienced firsthand. My tax returns vanished from my mailbox. All my larger envelopes arrive ripped straight open apparently by hand. When I show the postman, he says "That's impossible." Horrifyingly to me is the impact on my family. My childrens' report cards are returned again and again though perfectly addressed; their invitations are turned back; and my daughters many letters from camp? Vanished. All of them. Not one arrived. Try explaining that to a smart thirteen year old. Try explaining it in a way that still makes her feel secure and comfortable.

I am not telling you this because it's about my life. I am telling you this because it is about your life -- whoever you are, Conservative or Liberal, independent or evangelical. Your politics will not protect you in a police state. History shows that nothing portects you in a police state. This is not about my fear and anxiety: it is about what awaits you and everyone you love unless you see this for what it is.

Scharansky divided nations into "fear societies" and "free societies." Make no mistake: Sarah "Evita" Palin is Rove and Cheney's cosmetic rebranding of their fascist push: she will help to establish a true and irreversible "fear society" in this once free once proud nation. For God's sake, do not let her; do not let them.

 

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