quick dump of clips - lots of great snips to catch up on

NY Times lots of good Palin stuff
(PS if you haven't seen Tina Fey as Palin on SNL, its in YouTube & hilarious)

Film - Revisiting Coen Country for Odd Men in ‘Burn After Reading’ - NYTimes.com.pdf
‘Hounddog,’ With Dakota Fanning - A Heroine and a Movie Savagely Abused - NYTimes.com
Spanish town still haunted by its brush with Armageddon - International Herald Tribune.pdf
Wind-Power Politics - NYTimes.com
Saying “No” to Chemical Farming in India.pdf
Film - Wayne Wang, Bridging Generations and Hemispheres - NYTimes.com
Pope Visits Shrine at Lourdes, Focusing on Social Problems - NYTimes.com
Film - Revisiting Coen Country for Odd Men in ‘Burn After Reading’ - NYTimes.com
This Land - In the Wilds of New Jersey, a Legend Inspires a Hunt - Series - NYTimes.com.pdf
New election low_ distorting the fact-checking - Los Angeles Times.pdf
Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes - NYTimes.com
Active Role for Palin’s Husband in Alaska Government - NYTimes.com
organic India
Wind-Power Politics - NYTimes.com.pdf

dump:
9-14 NYT

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/us/15crash.html?ref=todayspaper

Warning System Could Prevent Train Crashes
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: September 14, 2008
LOS ANGELES — Federal investigators said Sunday that a collision warning system they have long called for could have prevented the head-on crash here last week between a commuter train and a freight train that killed 25 people.
The system, known as positive train control and in use sporadically in parts of the country, “would have prevented this accident,” said Kitty Higgins, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the accident.
The board has long pressed for such a system on all trains, but the industry has resisted on the grounds that it is expensive and in some cases not reliable.
But Ms. Higgins, speaking at a news conference here Sunday evening, said she made her assessment after reviewing the preliminary evidence of the investigation, which she said showed that the commuter train bypassed a red signal and barreled through a switch, bending it “like a banana.”



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/politics/14palin.html?sq=palin&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=all

Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes
WASILLA, Alaska — Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.
So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.
Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.
When Ms. Palin had to cut her first state budget, she avoided the legion of frustrated legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with her budget director and her husband, Todd, an oil field worker who is not a state employee, and vetoed millions of dollars of legislative projects.
And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.
“You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”
Ms. Palin walks the national stage as a small-town foe of “good old boy” politics and a champion of ethics reform. The charismatic 44-year-old governor draws enthusiastic audiences and high approval ratings. And as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, she points to her management experience while deriding her Democratic rivals, Senators Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., as speechmakers who never have run anything.
But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/politics/14todd.html?ref=politics

Active Role for Palin’s Husband in Alaska Government

By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Published: September 13, 2008

ANCHORAGE — In voting to issue a subpoena to Todd Palin in an investigation of the firing of the Alaska public safety commissioner, state lawmakers on Friday signaled that Mr. Palin, the husband of Gov. Sarah Palin, might have played a central role in one of the most contentious episodes of her governorship.
While that suggestion goes beyond the image presented of Mr. Palin during the Republican convention as a blue-collar family man and sportsman, it echoes a widely held understanding among lawmakers, state employees and lobbyists about Mr. Palin’s heavy engagement in state government.
In the small circle of advisers close to the governor, these people say, Mr. Palin is among the closest, and he plays an unpaid but central role in many aspects of the administration of Ms. Palin, the Republican nominee for vice president.
Mr. Palin’s involvement in the governor’s office has prompted an irreverent quip by some capital staff members when decisions are to be made that might affect the governor: “What would Todd do?”
Mr. Palin has encouraged lawmakers to support his wife’s agenda, helped her review budget items and polish speeches, surprised some lawmakers by sitting in on meetings and received copies of top administration staff e-mail messages.
Mr. Palin also has stepped into personnel issues that have personal relevance, most notably his contact with Walt Monegan, then the public safety commissioner, to express concern about the continued employment of a state trooper who had gone through a bitter divorce and custody battle with the governor’s sister. Mr. Monegan was later fired, and it is that firing that prompted the vote Friday on the subpoena.


http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/movies/12burn.html?scp=2&sq=coen&st=cse

MOVIE REVIEW
Burn After Reading (2008)

Coens Ask the C.I.A. for a License to Laugh
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: September 12, 2008

Heart isn’t usually part of the discussion when we talk about movies, partly, I imagine, because it sounds too corny. And fuzzy. After all, what does it mean to say this or that director or film shows a lot of heart or too little? I ask only because “Burn After Reading,” the clubby, predictably self-amused comedy from Joel and Ethan Coen, has a tricky plot, visual style, er, to burn, but so little heart as to warrant a Jarvik 8.
Not that you probably won’t choke up a couple of ho-ho’s in between a few hee-hee’s whenever Big Daddy Brad Pitt, as a nitwit gym rat with a Pepe Le Pew two-tone hair-stack, twitches across the screen or the camera nuzzles one of the other goofy gargoyles so beloved by the Coens. Mr. Pitt’s Chad is the overripe second banana to Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand, Joel Coen’s wife), who has some vague job at the gym where the two sort of work. Chad’s a buffoon (the hard body as soft brain), and Mr. Pitt has been charged with delivering a caricature rather than a character, but because the actor loves playing sidemen and conveys such natural, irrepressible (irresistible) sweetness, he’s also one of the film’s saving graces.
It could use a few more. Like most of the Coens’ comedies, “Burn After Reading” is something of a shaggy sendup of an established genre and conventions, in this case the espionage flick. The film opens and closes with a Google Maps view of the Earth that has already become a cinematic cliché, a godly perspective that rapidly narrows in on the headquarters for the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va. There, an analyst named Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) soon receives a demotion for boozing, the first knot in an increasingly and intentionally tangled thicket of contrivances and coincidences mostly involving three favorite American (and Hollywood) preoccupations: money, sex and self.
/.../
The biggest punch line is Linda, whom Ms. McDormand plays with a grin that tends to look more like a grimace, perhaps because she’s been saddled with yet another one of the Coens’ ghastly pageboy dos. (Really? Again?) It’s a punishing look for a cruelly unflattering character whose narcissism is matched only by her witlessness. Jerry Lewis has made a brilliant career out of playing stupid, but you never feel as if he loathes his disorderly orderlies because they’re slow on the uptake. The Coens in turn have made their careers with impeccable technique and an exaggerated visual style — they sure love their low-angle shots and traveling cameras — but it’s a wonder they keep making films about a subject for which they often evince so little regard, namely other people.


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/movies/14bloo.html?scp=2&sq=hounddog&st=cse

Like Its Heroine, a Movie Encounters Savage Treatment

By JULIE BLOOM
Published: September 12, 2008


IT was known as the “Dakota Fanning rape movie” at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007. The press screening for “Hounddog” elicited actual boos, not to mention eviscerating reviews. Even before that, evangelical groups protested the film after someone involved in its early financing alleged publicly (and erroneously) that Ms. Fanning was naked in it.
Few movies recover from such a hostile reception, especially a low-budget Southern-gothic tale set in 1959 about a 12-year-old motherless girl obsessed with Elvis Presley who seductively sings for a teenager in exchange for tickets to a concert of the King’s. But thanks to a radically different cut of the movie and the coffers of a new independent film company listed on the Nasdaq’s over-the-counter market, “Hounddog” will finally make its way into 22 theaters across the country on Sept. 19.
Sitting in the Cupcake Café in Clinton this month, the film’s director, Deborah Kampmeier, sipped tea and reflected on the journey of her film, which cost just under $4 million. “The whole process was challenging from the beginning,” she said. “It’s a story about a girl whose voice and spirit are silenced, and then it’s about her reclaiming her voice on a deeper, truer level. It’s very interesting how the story that I’m trying to tell has been paralleled by the actual events of the making of the film.”
The criticism began in July 2006 after Lawrence Robins, the disgruntled producer involved in the early financing, went, Ms. Kampmeier said, to the news media with concerns. The director found herself on the receiving end of death threats. Meanwhile, petitions demanded that Ms. Fanning’s mother, Joy, be jailed on charges relating to child pornography.
“I did not set out to make a controversial film or a social commentary,” Ms. Kampmeier said. “If Dakota Fanning is so shamed for telling that story, what message does that give victims? I did not set out to make a statement, but in the 12-year process of trying to get this film made I have been unable to avoid facing the politics of being a woman filmmaker and telling women stories” — a reference to the industry’s few female directors.
Ms. Kampmeier, who is 43 and lives in upstate New York, wrote the script in 1996. For years she worked to secure financing, which kept falling through. In April 2006, when she finally packed her daughter and her dog and drove to Wilmington, N.C., to begin preproduction, she was still unsure if there would be sufficient backing. “We started with just enough money to get us through one week of production, and it continued that way through the entire shoot,” she said. “It was so stressful.”
Despite the brewing controversy and financial uncertainty, Ms. Kampmeier submitted the film to Sundance, unbeknownst to her cast (including Robin Wright Penn, David Morse and Piper Laurie). When the acceptance came in November, Ms. Kampmeier was forced to scramble. “It was insane what we had to do to get it ready,” she said. “It was a rough cut, I mean, really rough. All we were able to do was get a plot with a beginning, middle and end.”
Ms. Kampmeier does not regret the decision: “If I hadn’t gotten into Sundance, I don’t think this film would have gotten finished.” Eric Parkinson, chief executive of the distribution arm of Empire Film Group, which purchased the film with a $1 million advance, disagrees. “I feel that Deborah made a strategic error when she showed a rough cut at Sundance, and as a result many people who were expecting to see a finished film got something that was choppy, that was pretty long, that didn’t have music, effects, titles, and so it didn’t get the greatest of reviews.”
It hasn’t made finding theaters for “Hounddog” any easier. “I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve had people actually sabotaging theatrical bookings,” Mr. Parkinson said, adding that three theater chains have not booked the film, presumably, he said, because of interest-group pressure. Wanda Whitson, a spokeswoman for the exhibitor National Amusements, said in an e-mail message that her company had heard from Empire but that “we have not yet previewed the film.” AMC and Cinemark, two other exhibitors, did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Parkinson said, “I know these same kind of arguments happened with ‘The Last Temptation of Christ,’ and every once in a while there is a movie that really irks some people, but this is America, you are supposed to be able to see movies if you want to.”
The ratings gods have not been helpful, either. The Motion Picture Association of America rebuffed attempts to secure a PG-13 rating. “I think you could argue that there’s nothing else in the film that’s any more exploitive than an episode of ‘Law & Order,’ ” Mr. Parkinson said.
The rape scene does remain in the new version, which also contains a major structural change. “I really wanted to make clear that she loses her voice,” Ms. Kampmeier said. “That she’s silenced, and that she then reclaims her voice, and once she’s reconnected to her true voice instead of the imitation of a man’s voice, Elvis’s voice, she’s able to walk away from this world. In thinking about that, I decided that I would take out after the rape any scene that she was talking in.”
Ms. Wright Penn, also an executive producer, said the delay actually helped the film. “The beauty of time is it destructs on one hand but it gives you an open vein that you didn’t know you had before, and you can be like, ‘Oh, my God, this is exactly what I wanted the film to say.’ ”
Now Ms. Kampmeier has enlisted several advocacy groups to support the film, including the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault and First Star, a children’s advocacy group in Washington.
Ms. Kampmeier said she never considered giving up on the film. “It’s my heart,” she added. “Even if people don’t like my heart, if my heart touches someone else’s, then it’s all worth it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/movies/14lim.html?ref=movies
FILM
Bridging Generations and Hemispheres

By DENNIS LIM
Published: September 12, 2008
IN Wayne Wang’s first feature, “Chan Is Missing” (1982), two taxi drivers go looking for an absent friend in San Francisco’s Chinatown. As they piece together contradictory testimonials from those who knew the missing man, what emerges is almost a composite sketch of Asian-American identity. But the film, which still feels fresh and insightful after all these years, is a mystery without a solution. Its conclusion, unencumbered by the foggy rhetoric of identity politics, is that identity is hard to pin down, up for grabs, something you make up as you go.

The point applies equally to this versatile director’s unpredictable career. For more than 25 years Mr. Wang, now 59, has reinvented himself time and again with apparent ease, zigzagging between America and Asia, big and small movies, safe bets and wild risks, insider and outsider status.
“The industry can really box you in, so you try to break the patterns,” he said over lunch in Manhattan in July.
“Chan Is Missing” and Mr. Wang’s second film, “Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart” (1985) established him as a central figure in two nascent movements: ’80s indie cinema and the Asian-American film scene. But he was eager to prove himself in the Hollywood idiom and followed up with the mainstream murder mystery “Slamdance” (1987). After his commercial breakthrough with “The Joy Luck Club” (1993), based on the Amy Tan best seller about two generations of Chinese women, he wanted to avoid being typecast as a China specialist or a director of weepies, and he collaborated with Paul Auster on “Smoke” (1995), a small, quiet drama set in a Brooklyn tobacco shop.
In recent years Mr. Wang has seemed content to play the role of studio journeyman, turning out smoothly anonymous movies like “Maid in Manhattan” (2002), a Jennifer Lopez fable of upward mobility; “Because of Winn-Dixie” (2005), a dog-centric family flick; and “Last Holiday” (2006), a Queen Latifah vehicle adapted from a 1950s Ealing comedy.
That phase of his career, he admits, went on longer than planned: “It was hard to get off the treadmill.”
Course-correcting yet again, Mr. Wang now returns to his first principles, even as he tries out some new tricks, with two of his most intimate films, “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” and “The Princess of Nebraska,” both based on stories by the Chinese-born author Yiyun Li (like Mr. Wang, a Bay Area resident).
“I felt I should go back to something smaller, more personal, something about the Chinese-American community,” he said. “Walking around Chinatown now, you feel how the community has changed, which has to do with the new immigrants and how China has changed.”
In “A Thousand Years,” opening Friday, a Chinese widower arrives in an American suburb for an extended stay with his divorced daughter, who has lived in the States since college and who resents her father’s intrusions into her private affairs. “The Princess of Nebraska,” which is being distributed free on the Web starting Oct. 17 (youtube.com/ytscreeningroom), concerns a newer arrival, a young woman from Beijing attending a university in Omaha who has traveled to San Francisco to get an abortion.
Both films are subtle updates of the immigrant story, revealing the complexities beyond the customary themes of alienation and assimilation. Mr. Wang’s own biography is hardly typical. Born in Hong Kong — and named after his father’s favorite movie star, John Wayne — he moved to California in the late ’60s for school. His parents, who were Christians, arranged for him to stay with a Quaker family, who turned out to be prominent radicals. “There were crazy meetings with Black Panthers and anti-draft protesters, and Jerry Garcia and his people were there all the time,” Mr. Wang said. “My eyes were completely opened.”
The initial plan, medical school, was soon abandoned in favor of the arts, a decision that did not please his father, a garment manufacturer. The relationship came under strain again in the ’80s when Mr. Wang married Cora Miao, an actress, without telling his parents. (“We didn’t want a banquet,” he said.) But because Ms. Miao was a celebrity in Hong Kong, they soon found out via the gossip columns.
The standoff in “A Thousand Years” between traditional parents and Westernized offspring, negotiating each other’s expectations and boundaries, holds personal resonance for Mr. Wang. He recalled a visit from his father shortly after the wedding: “One night he said to us, ‘How did you think you could get married with only $3,000 in your bank account?’ Clearly he’d been going through our things.”
Parent-child relationships figure prominently in Mr. Wang’s work. “Dim Sum,” “Joy Luck Club” and “Anywhere but Here” (1999) revolve around mother-daughter bonds; “Smoke” is about the search for a surrogate father. The rote psychological explanation would be that Mr. Wang is working through his relationship with his father, who died a few years ago. But it could also be, he suggested, because he and his wife do not have children.
“I don’t think I idealize parent-child relationships,” he said, “but maybe I’m interested in that conflict because I don’t have my own conflicts.” Besides returning him to familiar themes “A Thousand Years” was an opportunity to indulge in a more contemplative pace, a luxury he forfeited on his Hollywood films. “The Princess of Nebraska,” on the other hand, was an outlet for his experimental side, responsible for films like “Life Is Cheap ... but Toilet Paper Is Expensive” (1989), a rambunctious Hong Kong-set shaggy-dog thriller.
By habit Mr. Wang works efficiently, to the point of turning projects into two-for-one deals. With time to spare after wrapping “Smoke,” he dashed off “Blue in the Face,” a freewheeling companion piece. “Princess of Nebraska” came about when he finished under budget on “A Thousand Years” and convinced his producers that he could fill out a double bill.
With “Princess” he was keen to capture the particularities of younger Chinese immigrants, whom he jokingly called an “alien” species. (He is prone to goofy jokes, and his laugh, an infectious, high-pitched guffaw, is perhaps his most distinctive trait.) “They’re Westernized but also ethnocentric,” he said. “Princess” also serves as a bridge between two generations of Chinese-American filmmakers. In search of a younger collaborator for this micro-budgeted film, Mr. Wang approached the Center for Asian American Media in San Francisco and was introduced to Richard Wong, who had just directed a well-reviewed first feature, “Colma: The Musical.”
Mr. Wong, 31, was the cinematographer on “Princess,” which was shot on consumer-grade digital video, and is credited as co-director. “It must have been liberating for Wayne to do something so guerrilla, where you could make every decision on the fly,” Mr. Wong said.
Mr. Wang sees a younger version of himself in Mr. Wong. “There’s a rebellious creativity there,” he said, “and he brought that out of me.”
At his age Mr. Wang admits that he is increasingly wary of the traps of fogeyism. “In some ways I’m getting more conservative, but it’s also part of my makeup to take risks, and I hope I never lose that,” he said. “I never wanted to get old and become one of those 50-year-old guys who are comfortable doing whatever they’re doing.”