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Conservative Bishop Denies Kennedy His Holy Cracker*
Posted by Joshua Holland on November 23, 2009 at 4:30 PM.
The war of words between the Catholic bishop of Rhode Island and US Representative Patrick J. Kennedy escalated yesterday when Bishop Thomas J. Tobin criticized him for disclosing a confidential request the prelate made in 2007 to stop receiving Holy Communion because of his stand on moral issues.
Tobin said he was disappointed the congressman had told a newspaper that he had been forbidden from receiving communion in Rhode Island because of Kennedy’s support of abortion rights. The bishop also accused the son of the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy of prolonging their public feud.
[...]
Tobin and Kennedy have been exchanging testy words for weeks. Earlier this month, the bishop, who was installed in 2005, disputed Kennedy’s contention that disagreeing with church hierarchy on matters like abortion rights makes him no less of a Catholic.
“Well in fact, congressman, in a way it does,’’ the bishop wrote in a commentary in the Rhode Island Catholic newspaper. “Your position is unacceptable to the church and scandalous to many of our members.’’
One of the bloggers over at Truthdig sounds the requisite note:
Hey, it’s their clubhouse and rules are rules—just as long as the church also denies communion to politicians who support the death penalty, cut poverty programs and covet thy neighbors’ wives.
Forgot to mention those who are gung-ho for perma-war!
* Kudos to Truthdig's blog for the headline "Give Kennedy His Cracker," presumably a reference to PZ Myers' "Cracker-gate" scandal.
Glenn Beck Dividing U.S. into 7 Parts ... Will Offer Americans Right-Wing Education
Posted by Staff, Media Matters for America on November 23, 2009 at 1:57 PM.
Who says conservatives don't value book learnin'?
Check out the video to your right, courtesy of Media Matters.
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Sarah Palin Celebrates Her Humble Roots by Eating at a Restaurant That Serves a $25,000 Dessert
Posted by Byard Duncan, AlterNet on November 23, 2009 at 1:30 PM.
Sarah Palin, ever the faux-populist, has finally committed an act of absurdity that perfectly allegorizes her own political M.O.
Last week, while in New York City, Palin dined at Serendipity 3, a restaurant in one of Manhattan’s swankier sections. Serendipity 3 is known for hosting celebrities (others have included Zac Efron and Bill Clinton), but it’s not famous for that. It’s famous for the "Frrozen Haute Chocolate," a sundae composed of edible gold and 28 different cocoas from across the globe. This treat, which costs $25,000, holds the Guinness world record for most expensive dessert. It is eaten with a diamond-studded gold spoon and served with a side of $2,600 per-pound chocolate. At the base of the sundae’s goblet (it is served, by the way, in a goblet) is an 18-karat gold bracelet with 1 carat of white diamonds.
One can only assume that the banana leaves to be fanned with are sold separately.
So how does Palin’s stop at Serendipity compromise her everywoman persona? Let me count the ways. Not only was she in one of the more expensive corners of the Big Apple (a city she promised ‘true’ Americans she would not visit during her book tour, on account of its elites); she was dining at a restaurant where just one item costs more than what many of her supporters will make in a year. Maybe more than twice what some of them will make.
Of course, this sort of gleaming, gold-plated contradiction is nothing new for Palin. Even the most baby-witted of observers know that her two main recipients of polito-pandering (working class Americans, the corporations that routinely screw them over) don’t quite line up right. No, the beauty here is the symbolism of it all -- the sweet, flagrant absurdity: Underdog (dare we say it? "Rogue") politician, preparing to set out across America in a grassroots neo-conquest of a book tour, must first stop to fuel up for the harrowing journey. What better place to do so than at a restaurant whose finest dessert costs as much as a year of college?
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Is a Desperate Desire For Leadership Behind the Droves Of Americans Waiting to Meet Sarah Palin?
Posted by Gary Younge, Comment Is Free on November 23, 2009 at 11:30 AM.
In the film, The American President, the president's speechwriter Lewis Rothschild (played by Michael J Fox) appeals to the commander-in-chief to take a firm, clear stand against the Right. "People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone." he says. "They want leadership. They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand."
The president (played by Michael Douglas) retorts that the American electorate's problem is not a lack of leadership but an undiscerning palate.
"We've had presidents who were beloved, who couldn't find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight," he says. "People don't drink the sand because they're thirsty. They drink the sand because they don't know the difference."
As the faithful wait in line in small towns across the country (some for more than a day) to see Sarah Palin on her book tour, the question of whether the U.S. is deprived of a competent political class or gets the leadership it both deserves and truly desires seems as pertinent as ever.
On the one hand there is roughly between a quarter and a third of America that will clearly believe anything. That is the figure that strongly approved of George Bush's handling of the economy last year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the bailout. That same figure, in the immediate aftermath of hurricane Katrina, believed that Bush's response to the disaster was "about right", and still supports the war in Iraq.
That also happens to be approximately the same proportion of Americans who back Palin for president. Most data suggest the overlap is considerable. Palin's rise to prominence, from little-known governor to one of the most popular and arguably most charismatic Republicans in the country in just a year, has been startling. She had a thin record when she was picked to run as vice-president. Today, having quit the Alaska governorship mid-term and published a bestseller, only her wallet is thicker.
Her resignation speech was so rambling that you would have struggled to find a coherent sentence with an industrial-strength searchlight. "Let me go back to a comfortable analogy for me – sports," she announced. "I use it because you're naive if you don't see the national full-court press picking away right now: A good point guard drives through a full court press, protecting the ball, keeping her eye on the basket ... and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can win." This was not the answer to a hostile interview from the "liberal media elite" but a prepared speech of her own making.
It would be easy to discount her as just a media phenomenon who would go away if we stopped talking about her. That would be a mistake. It would be even easier to poke fun at her as just a small town hick who has blundered into the limelight with a nod, wink and a "you betcha." That too would be a mistake.
For the very things that liberal commentators ridicule her for -- being inarticulate, unworldly, simplistic and hokey -- are the very things that make her attractive to her base. Indeed, every time she is taunted she becomes more popular because it reaffirms the (not entirely mistaken) view that the deeply held values of a sizable section of the population are being disparaged.
The same dynamic was true for George Bush, but with one crucial exception. Bush is the scion of a wealthy family who turned his back on the cultural trappings of his class while embracing the social confidence and political and financial entitlement that came with it. Palin had none of those advantages: she grew up far from power and privilege in every sense.
The difference in their comfort levels when put on the spot with simple questions was evident when each was asked about their newspaper reading habits. Bush was cocky: "The best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world." Palin froze: "I've read most of them … all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years."
In her world, Ivy League is a slur; cities are not the "real America"; and those who know the price of arugula but cannot handle a rifle are not to be trusted. Palin is the antithesis of an aspirational figure. Her supporters love her not because they want to be like her, but because they already are like her. So for better and for worse, Palin is an entirely self-made – and, if her book is anything to go by, self-invented – personification of the kind of political animal Bush sought to both emulate and nurture. Bush was Palin-lite.
To that extent her performance over the past year has been more tragic than comic. Palin represents the thwarted aspirations and brooding resentment of a large section of white working class Americans. That is not to suggest that her supporters are necessarily racist, but polls show her support is racially exclusive.
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Obama Is Playing Politics With Gitmo
Posted by Nick Baumann, Mother Jones Online on November 23, 2009 at 10:30 AM.
Liberals have not done enough public wrestling with Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf's Time article on the ouster of White House counsel Gregory Craig. Perhaps that's because they don't want to deal with the article's troubling implications. As Kevin explains, Craig was "the White House lawyer tasked with dismantling Bush-era interrogation and detention policies. At first, Obama was on board with Craig's plans. Then, reality set in."
By "reality," Kevin presumably means "political reality." Time says that as soon as Obama's positions on Bush era torture -- releasing the torture photos, for example -- became politically difficult, the president jettisoned them. He did this despite the fact that he had been "prepared to accept -- and had even okayed" those same positions "just weeks earlier":
First to go was the release of the pictures of detainee abuse. Days later, Obama sided against Craig again, ending the suspension of Bush's extrajudicial military commissions. The following week, Obama pre-empted an ongoing debate among his national-security team and embraced one of the most controversial of Bush's positions: the holding of detainees without charges or trial, something he had promised during the campaign to reject.
But perhaps the most damning part of the Time piece is this sentence, near the beginning, that summarizes exactly what has happened in Obama's White House:
[Obama] quietly shifted responsibility for the legal framework for counterterrorism from Craig to political advisers overseen by Emanuel, who was more inclined to strike a balance between left and right.
Take a minute to think about how the left would respond to this if Obama was a Republican president. Obama delegated the responsibility for determining what to do about detainees to his political advisers. If George W. Bush had charged his political advisers, including Karl Rove, with crafting such policy, the entire blogosphere would have melted down from outrage overload.
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