Archive for April, 2009

Glenn Beck: The Fears of a Clown

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

From Time Magazine:

On March 23, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner unveiled the Obama Administration’s toxic-bank-assets plan. The stock markets cheered the news, sending the Dow up 497 points.

This meant one thing: it was time for Glenn Beck to break out the Jenga set.

The new populist superstar of Fox News has made a refrain of predicting that government policies are leading to disaster — dark, ruinous, blood-in-the-streets kind of disaster. Pausing for a 17-minute speech rebutting his critics for calling him “dangerous” and “crazy,” he took out the block-tower game. On opposite sides of the tower were written the words solution and problem, taxpayer and children. Then he spent much of the hour critiquing the plan, all the while pulling pieces from the wobbling tower and stacking them on top. (Read an interview with Glenn Beck.)

For Beck, Jenga is a metaphor for the plan’s risk. But it is also a metaphor for Beck’s show, which teeters from humor to predictions of apocalypse to self-esteem sermons to fits of weeping. (”I’m sorry. I just love my country. And I fear for it.”) This is what makes it so compelling: the breathless feeling that at any moment, everything could spectacularly collapse.

A year ago, with Fox News in an election-year ratings slump, some TV observers (like me) wondered if its conservative commentators could thrive in an Obama era. The answer is yes, and how. Fox roared back and has more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined.

It’s succeeded partly because of its veteran stars Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. But to Hannity’s tax-cut Republicanism and O’Reilly’s grumpy social conservatism, Beck adds an au courant strain of grievance. Beck had a similar program on Headline News (which I appeared on once), on which he at one point asked a Muslim Congressman to “prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.” After he moved to Fox in January, his audience exploded to 2 million-plus viewers — unheard of at 5 p.m. His hook, for the age of economic anxiety: whereas O’Reilly embodies anger and Hannity brashness, Beck embraces fear. (See pictures of Bill O’Reilly’s career in journalism.)

Fear of what? Take your pick. Fear that the U.S. is on a long march to fascism. (As evidence, Beck cited — on April Fools’ Day but apparently seriously — the inclusion of fasces on the Mercury dime in 1916.) That fat cats and bureaucratic “bloodsuckers” are plundering your future. That Mexico will collapse and chaos will pour over the border. That America believes too little in God and too much in global warming. That “they” — Big Government, Big Business, Big Media — are against you. Above all, that you, small-town, small-business America — Palinville — have been forgotten. Dismissed. Laughed at. Just like him. (See the top 10 TV feuds.)

It’s hard to identify a Beck ideology so much as a set of attitudes, sometimes contradictory ones. He channels anger against Wall Street but defends the bonuses for AIG executives. He devoted a segment to debunking a conspiracy theory about FEMA “concentration camps” but has warned that the AmeriCorps program “indoctrinates your child into community service.”

What unites Beck’s disparate themes is a sense of siege. On March 13, he served up a kind of fear combo platter — war, chaos, totalitarianism, financial ruin — with the 9/12 Project, a tearful call to viewers to rediscover the common purpose they felt after 9/11. In 2001, that common purpose involved cable-news talkers’ dialing down the us-vs.-them shtick for a day or two; now Beck urged viewers to reject the notion that “they” have all the power. “They don’t surround us,” he declared. “We surround them.”

Beck’s surround sound plays like a mix of colonial pamphleteering, Great Depression demagoguery and the movie Red Dawn. But is he serious? He describes himself as a “rodeo clown,” and he is a talented TV showman — joking and self-effacing, with a gift for big visuals and low-tech explainer stunts like his Jenga bit. Unlike O’Reilly et al., he’s not a shouter. He calls his program “the fusion of entertainment and enlightenment.”

Then again, he recently devoted a “War Room” episode to gaming out an American economic collapse in 2014 — the result of debt and high taxes — including the rise of “Mad Max” militias and civil unrest. Because if anything spells laff riot, it’s the breakdown of lawful society! Whether Beck is stirring up frightening social currents or just playing in them, his material and its resonance are deadly serious.

Of course, I’m a “them.” And if there’s one thing we thems love, it’s tarring dissenters as scary. As he played with his Jenga tower, Beck made just that point, introducing his next guest, former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. “Remember,” Beck said sarcastically, “he is a dangerous militia member!”

Then a wooden piece gave way, and the whole toy edifice came crashing down.

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Huntsman Sees Civil Unions As Path To Bigger Tent

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

From National Journal Online:

Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman calls himself a “traditional Republican” and presides over the reddest state in the country. But he doesn’t shy away from criticizing his own party. He wants the GOP to “broaden its base” to regain its national standing and says he thinks the country is ready for a Mormon president. NationalJournal.com’s Amy Harder recently spoke with Huntsman to find out his take on the presidential hype and the GOP’s path forward. Edited excerpts follow. Visit the archives page for more Insider Interviews.

NJ: How would you grade the Republicans’ first 100 days?

Huntsman: It would be incomplete in the sense that they’ve got — we as a party — we’ve got about 50 percent of being the loyal opposition down well, while the other half, which is presenting viable policy proposals and real ideas, we have failed at. I would give it an incomplete, and say we’re about halfway home.

NJ: What kind of policy changes or alternatives could Republicans present but haven’t yet?

Huntsman: We as a party — unlike the [Newt] Gingrich revolution of the early ’90s, where there was a good, solid set of policy recommendations that the party could rally around — we don’t have that right now. And because we don’t have that, we’re trading at an all-time low in terms of public opinion, probably lower than any other time since Watergate.

NJ: You recently said the GOP “isn’t moving anywhere right now.” How do you think Republicans should move forward?

Huntsman: There is a course, and it’s the same course the Democrats had to take 10 years ago. Things go in cycles, historically speaking, and we’ll be back in action over time; it’s just the pathway that we choose at this point and whether or not that’s a short-term comeback or a long-term comeback.

It must begin with a meritocracy of ideas. You’ve got to have ideas competing in the marketplace under the Republican banner that are playing out in the incubators of democracy called the states.

NJ: Would you consider yourself more moderate than other Republicans when it comes to social issues?

Huntsman: I don’t do well with tags. I’m a traditional Republican. People hired me to balance budgets, to make the economy work and to find fixes for health care and energy and transportation, and that’s what I spend every waking hour doing. They didn’t hire me to be a moralizer.

NJ: Why have you chosen to speak out in favor of civil unions?

Huntsman: Well, I didn’t speak out on them, I was asked. And that’s typically how journalism works. You’re asked a question, you answer it and then it becomes a story. I have long been in favor of fairness and equality as long as I’ve been in office, and as long as I am in office that’s exactly what I’ll stand for.

I’m a traditionalist when it comes to gay marriage. I believe [marriage] should be between a man and a woman. I believe marriage ceremonies are sacred and they draw strongly on all sorts of traditions. But subordinate to that, we’ve not done a very good job in providing others who are in nontraditional relationships equal treatment. And I think there’s probably room for improvement there.

NJ: There has been movement in states around the country toward gay marriage, and McCain campaign director Steve Schmidt recently called for the party to support such marriages. What’s your reaction to Schmidt’s comments?

Huntsman: We have a real need to broaden our base as a party. When you look at the demographics of the Republican Party, we’ve lost a good many voters and a good many voters have gone independent. And you have to ask yourself a question: Why is the independent “party” larger than either the Republican or Democratic Party?…

The Republican Party is going to have to make some strides to win independents back into the fold, and that’s not going to be an easy thing to do. But if we do something about showing a sense of fairness and equality toward all citizens, that might be a good first step.

NJ: What do you mean by “something”?

Huntsman: In our case — at least in my case — I do think that civil unions is one approach that does speak to equality and fairness. A lot of people — and I would put myself in that category — are traditionalists when it comes to traditional marriages between a man and a woman, but I think there is more that we can do to prove the point that we are a party that does believe in fairness.

NJ: After calling out Republicans for their “gratuitous political carping,” you said the party needs to make bold moves on issues like health care and energy. How should the federal government go about passing energy legislation that will help Western states?

Huntsman: The most important thing we can do is to embrace a meaningful incentive that actually attracts the manufacturers of capital equipment, and then allow the producers of energy the opportunity to build new, world-class facilities. That takes land, and that takes an updated and enhanced grid system in order to deliver the energy. And it’s something that is very difficult to do on your own, state by state. It’s something that really does require federal assistance and support because it crosses borders.

NJ: Some Republicans do not believe that carbon is a contributing factor to global warming. What is your stance on that?

Huntsman: Every physics department in the country, every meteorology department in the country, every academy of sciences in the Western world, has pretty much weighed in on this as an issue. There is a substantial body of science that would lead to: This is an emerging problem and the fact that humans do contribute to the problem. Therefore, it’s up to us as policymakers to figure out what to do about it.

There are a lot of different approaches that we can take. You have to see it in free-market terms. You have to deal with it realistically, knowing that you can’t put a burden on consumers who are already carrying the load of high energy costs. But you do have to deal realistically with emissions.

NJ: How do you see religion and its role in politics evolving over the next four years?

Huntsman: I think, as we’ve seen in elections in recent history, people want their president to humbly serve the voters who put him in office, to maintain a viable and competitive economy, to manage a strong and confident foreign policy and, above all, prepare the way for the next generation of Americans. That is first and foremost what voters want out of their elected officials.

NJ: So are you saying that religion as an issue has become less important?

Huntsman: I think religion for most people is a highly personal thing. That will play out as it will.

NJ: Do you think the country is ready for a Mormon president?

Huntsman: I think ultimately that is a real possibility — just as it was for a Catholic in 1960. Barriers are broken all the time.

NJ: Your name has surfaced as a possible 2012 presidential candidate. In fact, John McCain recently mentioned your name first as a contender on “Meet The Press.” Why do you think your name is coming up as a possibility?

Huntsman: Could be the total depths of despair of the party. [Laughs]. Hey, listen, I think we really are at a point in time where a lot of names are going to be thrown out, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re being thrown out in a meaningful fashion. It’s just — we’re looking for ideas and people associated with ideas that might be able to take us forward in a successful way. And it’s hard to know where that’s going to go.

It’s presumptuous for me or anybody else to say they’re lining up or they’re going to be a serious contender in the future, because it must be tied to real ideas and real solutions, to preeminence and not just partisans.

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Mormon Tabernacle Choir celebrates centennial

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

From Intermountain Catholic:

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir opens the Madeleine Festival of the Arts and Humanities April 18-19 with two historic concerts. “When the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performed in the Cathedral in 1993, they did not have the Orchestra to accompany them, and it was magnificent then,” said Drew Browning Madeleine Festival program director. We knew that would add a special dimension. IC photo by Christine Young

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir opens the Madeleine Festival of the Arts and Humanities April 18-19 with two historic concerts. “When the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performed in the Cathedral in 1993, they did not have the Orchestra to accompany them, and it was magnificent then,” said Drew Browning Madeleine Festival program director. We knew that would add a special dimension. IC photo by Christine Young

SALT LAKE CITY — In anticipation of the centennial of the Cathedral of the Madeleine Aug. 15, the world renowned Mormon Tabernacle Choir returned for two historic concerts April 18-19. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir under the direction of Mack Wilberg, opened the Madeleine Festival of the Arts and Humanities accompanied by the Orchestra at Temple Square.

“Their opening piece, ‘Praise to the Lord, the Almighty,’ was so powerful with approximately 300 singers and 65 musicians,” said Drew Browning, Madeleine Festival program director. “The sacred environment of the Cathedral of the Madeleine and the known quality of their singing in the acoustical space of the cathedral was nothing other than magical.

“I just cannot describe it any other way,” said Browning. “I had out-of-state relatives here from several places in the country, and they were really quite wowed by the concert. It was really quite special. I just thought it was unbelievable.”

Mormon Tabernacle Choir Director Mack Wilberg led the audience on a journey around the world with a performance called “A Celebration in Sacred Song.”

The concert began with three German hymns, followed by two Russian songs of praise. They then sang three English Psalms, joined by Madeleine Choir School soloists sixth-grader Deron Parcell and seventh-grader Jonathan Savastano. Parcell was also a soloist on “Halle, Halle, Halle.”

Wilberg specifically requested that choristers from the Madeleine Choir School sing solo parts in Holst’s “Psalm 86,” and “Halle, Halle, Halle,” a traditional Caribbean melody. This was Parcell’s second solo collaboration with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, having performed with them in last year’s Dear Valley Music Festival.

Parcell is only in his second year at the Madeleine Choir School, and has also performed with the Utah Symphony and Opera, and with Dr. Brady Allred’s Salt Lake Choral Artists. This was Savastano’s debut performing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. He will also be singing with the Utah Symphony during Music Director Keith Lockhart’s grand finale concert in May.

“It was nice to see a range of selections that Wilberg put together that showed sacred songs from various places around the world,” said Browning.”

The final selections were American folk hymns and African-American spirituals.

“To end the concert with ‘Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,’ was stunning,” said Browning. “Within three weeks of their recent CD being released, it has reached number one on the Classical Billboard chart. So it is just phenomenal.

“We have been planning for this celebration for about five years,” said Browning. “It was October 2004, when I started thinking about the centennial in 2009, and how it would really be nice to open the centennial year Madeleine Festival with something very special. I knew that when we re-opened the Cathedral of the Madeleine in 1993, after it had been restored, we had asked the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to perform. The program was called “Music for a Great Space.” To our knowledge that was the only other time in history the Mormon Tabernacle Choir had ever sang here. So we invited them to come back.

“We knew we would have to schedule more than one performance due to the limited seating in the Cathedral and our previous experience with tremendous crowds trying to attend the 1993 concert,” said Browning.

“It has been a pleasure to be here in this historical and sacred place,” said Wilberg. “What a thrill it has been to be with you and for you to be with us.”

Mormon Tabernacle Choir member Scott Russon said the sound in the Cathedral was great.

“There was a feeling that I had when we were singing ‘Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,’” said Russon, who has been in the choir for a year.

“The last verse,” added Lindsey Snarr, who has been in the choir for seven years. “It just took over my body from top to bottom. It was big.”

“Exactly,” said Russon. “I just had this sense that everybody in the whole Cathedral was feeling this, and there was a feeling of reverence to God. No matter how you perceive God, it was to him. It was such a worshipful feeling.”

“The sound in the Cathedral was great. The ceilings are so high, it makes such a cathedral sound,” said Jeffrey Scott, a young orchestra member. “It was really nice. I really enjoyed playing here. We thank them for inviting us.”

The Mormon Tabernacle choir is composed of 360 volunteer singers aged 25 to 60, who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They practice and perform weekly. The choir originated in the mid-19th century. A small choir first sang for a conference of the LDS Church in 1847, just 29 days after the first pioneers arrived to settle in the Salt Lake Valley.

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From a mission to the mound

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

From The Daily of the University of Washington:

Adrian Gomez hadn’t pitched in two years.

From September 2006 to September 2008, he was on a church mission in Mexico, practicing his baseball every so often by throwing oranges or chucking rocks at dogs that chased him on the streets of Guadalajara.

And when it came time for the pitcher from Battleground, Wash., to return to the UW baseball team this season, head coach Ken Knutson had to introduce Gomez to the new members of the team.

“Kenny had been talking about me,” said Gomez. “He would tell stories about, ‘You guys are here throwing baseballs, he’s just out there throwing … rocks at dogs.’ That was the introduction.”

Perhaps re-introduction would be a better word.

Now a sophomore, Gomez came to the UW in 2006 and immediately made an impact on the mound as a freshman, but as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he left on the church mission he had been eyeing since he was 12 years old.

Now he’s back, trying to readjust and pitch at the level he was recruited for three years ago.

Knutson might have been apprehensive about allowing one of his new pitchers to go on a mission one year into a college baseball career, but both he and Gomez agreed that, as long as he returned to pitch for the Huskies, Knutson would be OK with it.

“I went into the interview with [Knutson], and the first thing I said was, ‘Look, I’m going to be leaving in a year, and for two years I’m going to be on a mission. What do you feel about that?’” Gomez said. “He didn’t say anything for, like, 10 minutes. I was just sitting there really quiet, and finally, he said that would be OK.”

So after his first year — during which he tossed 28 1/3 innings with a 4.45 ERA and led the Huskies to a 13-inning 5-4 victory over Washington State — he departed for Mexico.

But, being a Mormon missionary, Gomez had a lot of hardship ahead of him — hardship he said made him humble and made him work harder to achieve his goals.

Gomez had to learn Spanish essentially from scratch and woke up at 4 a.m., more than two hours earlier than the rest of his group in the heart of Guadalajara, to study the language.

“Some nights I would just come home crying because I couldn’t understand people, and they couldn’t understand me,” Gomez said. “But, little by little, I got better and better and eventually mastered the language to where I could joke with people and get along on a daily basis.”

That was just the language, only one aspect of his time in Mexico.

Gomez continued his study of the Book of Mormon and spent most of his days doing what missionaries do — helping those in need.

“I would … mow people’s lawns, sweep people’s front porches,” Gomez said. “I washed a lot of houses’ dishes and offer to come in and help them.”

His time in Mexico was exhausting; He started out in Guadalajara, went to Puerto Vallarta and then traveled throughout Mexico. Gomez didn’t skip a beat, doing his missionary work 12 hours a day, seven days a week.

“It was two years of absolute work,” Gomez said. “I lost a lot of weight. I got sick a lot. I walked probably 12 miles a day. And I came home with nothing.”

In fact, the day after he got back to Seattle, he walked to baseball practice with nothing but the shirt and tie that he had on from his mission. It was like a reverse culture shock.

For two long years, he hadn’t seen his teammates, hadn’t seen his coach, hadn’t seen the girl he dated before the mission — Corinne, now his wife.

“It was tough to adjust,” Gomez said. “They gave me new shoes, everything that I have on. It was amazing to be able to get all this stuff when I had nothing.”  (cont.)

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Jay Bybee: The Man Behind Waterboarding

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

From Time Magazine:

Jay Bybee has been called the “forgotten man” in the mounting furor over the CIA’s harsh interrogation of imprisoned terror suspects — but he’s quickly assuming a leading role. Though the mild-mannered lawyer has attracted little public attention, as a top Justice Department official he approved an array of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” against alleged al-Qaeda members that many observers call torture. They include forcing prisoners to stay awake for a week or more, waterboarding them and trapping them with an insect to exploit their fear of bugs.

Now a federal judge, Bybee, 55, led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel from November 2001 to March 2003 and signed off on a 2002 memo, recently released by the Obama Administration, authorizing the rough stuff in clinical detail. Along with his deputy John Yoo, Bybee infamously claimed that interrogation practices aren’t legally torture unless they inflict pain resembling that of “serious physical injury” such as organ failure or death. While supporters say the policies helped keep the country safe in the wake of Sept. 11, critics say the memos are illegal and helped pave the way for the abuses seen at the Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere. (See pictures of the aftershocks of Abu Ghraib.

Though Bybee wasn’t the only person responsible for crafting the Bush administration’s interrogation policy, unlike his erstwhile colleagues he continues to hold public office, sitting on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He now faces calls for impeachment from Sen. Patrick Leahy, former Obama aide John Podesta and the New York Times editorial board, among other corners. The Justice Department has distanced itself from much of Bybee’s work and is reportedly preparing a scathing internal report that could call for him and others to be reprimanded or even disbarred.

Associates say Bybee was working under intense pressure and isn’t proud of his controversial work. As a friend told the Washington Post, “I’ve heard him express regret that the memo was misused.”

Fast Facts:

• Born in 1955 in Oakland. Met his wife, a high school teacher, at a screening of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” at the National Archives. They have four children.

• Served as a Mormon missionary in Chile from 1973-1975.

• Graduated magna cum laude from Brigham Young University in 1977, earning his law degree there three years later.

• Worked as an associate at the prestigious firm of Sidley & Austin in Washington before joining the Justice Department in 1984. Later served as Associate Counsel to President George H.W. Bush.

• Spent 10 years as a law professor at Louisiana State University and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was named Professor of the Year in 2000.

• Returned to the Justice Department as Assistant Attorney General and head of the Office of Legal Counsel in 2001.

• Confirmed by the Senate to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in March 2003 by a vote of 74-19. Some Democrats now say they would have blocked his confirmation if they had known about the interrogation memos.

• A former Eagle Scout.

• A kazoo enthusiast, he reportedly performed Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” with other kazoo players at Louisiana State University.

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Statistics show fast Mormon church growth

Saturday, April 11th, 2009

From KIFI-Idaho Falls:

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - An editor of a yearbook of church demographics says year-to-year membership statistics for the Mormon church place the Utah-based faith among the fastest-growing religious traditions in the U.S. and Canada.

Eileen Lindner, of the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, says it’s hard to compare data among faiths because counting methods vary. But annual data provide a good roadmap of growth within an individual church.

Data released Saturday by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints place its worldwide membership at 13.5 million as of Dec. 31, 2008. That’s up from 13.1 million in 2007. Growth is occurring fastest outside of North America.

The yearbook uses figures provided by the church and Lindner says Mormon data are considered reliable because the church employs professional demographers.

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