ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told ministry students at her former church that the United States sent troops to fight in the Iraq war on a “task that is from God.”

In an address last June, the Republican vice presidential candidate also urged ministry students to pray for a plan to build a $30 billion natural gas pipeline in the state, calling it “God’s will.”

Palin asked the students to pray for the troops in Iraq, and noted that her eldest son, Track, was expected to be deployed there.

“Our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God,” she said. “That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God’s plan.”

The rest of the article is here.

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Every August, a couple hundred theatre companies, some long established, others formed specifically for the event at hand, converge on lower Manhattan for the New York International Fringe Festival (NYIFF). Billed as the “the largest multi-arts festival in North America,” the festival’s organizers claim that it “generates an atmosphere of extreme excitement” and that their “energy is contagious!” Indeed, to be sure they were getting across just how excited they were — and how excited we should be — about about the festival, the homepage of the 2008 festival employed no fewer than seventeen exclamation points. Some sentences had so much excitement bursting out of them that one exclamation wasn’t enough (“Subscribe to the FringeNYC Fans newsletter!!”)

For the first few years of the Fringe — which has now been around for twelve years, more than long enough to make many of us feel old for remembering year one — it was almost possible to share in the excitement, manufactured or not. New York has a sprawling, chaotic, energetic, and vital scene of small, independent theatre companies. Many of these companies come and go in a year or two; most lose money; much of the work is dreadful. Despite, or perhaps even because of, these caveats, many consider this scene the heart of New York theatre. The high-priced, risk-averse, aesthetically conservative, middlebrow, blandly competent work generally produced by the commercial and institutional theatres of Broadway and, increasingly, off-Broadway, certainly doesn’t seem representative of the anarchic energy that seems to fuel so much of the theatre in this city.

Full article here.

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The distraction doesn’t change the political savvy, structural sophistication, rhetorical power, historical context, or flawless delivery of the speech (embedded below.)

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It’s Election Day 2008. We Democrats are giving America a wake-up call. Wake up, America. In 2001, the oil companies, the war contractors and the neo-con artists seized the economy and have added 4 trillion dollars of unproductive spending to the national debt. We now pay four times more for defense, three times more for gasoline and home heating oil and twice what we paid for health care.

Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, their homes, their health care, their pensions. Trillions of dollars for an unnecessary war paid with borrowed money. Tens of billions of dollars in cash and weapons disappeared into thin air, at the cost of the lives of our troops and innocent Iraqis, while all the president’s oilmen are maneuvering to grab Iraq’s oil.

Borrowed money to bomb bridges in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. No money to rebuild bridges in America. Money to start a hot war with Iran. Now we have another cold war with Russia, while the American economy has become a game of Russian roulette.

If there was an Olympics for misleading, mismanaging and misappropriating, this administration would take the gold. World records for violations of national and international laws. They want another four-year term to continue to alienate our allies, spend our children’s inheritance and hollow out our economy.

We can’t afford another Republican administration. Wake up, America. The insurance companies took over health care. Wake up, America. The pharmaceutical companies took over drug pricing.

Wake up, America. The speculators took over Wall Street. Wake up, America. They want to take your Social Security. Wake up, America. Multinational corporations took over our trade policies, factories are closing, good paying jobs lost.

Wake up, America. We went into Iraq for oil. The oil companies want more. War against Iran will mean $10-a-gallon gasoline. The oil administration wants to drill more, into your wallet. Wake up, America. Weapons contractors want more. An Iran war will cost 5 to 10 trillion dollars.

This administration can tap our phones. They can’t tap our creative spirit. They can open our mail. They can’t open economic opportunities. They can track our every move. They lost track of the economy while the cost of food, gasoline and electricity skyrockets. They skillfully played our post-9/11 fears and allowed the few to profit at the expense of the many. Every day we get the color orange, while the oil companies, the insurance companies, the speculators, the war contractors get the color green.

Wake up, America. This is not a call for you to take a new direction from right to left. This is call for you to go from down to up. Up with the rights of workers. Up with wages. Up with fair trade. Up with creating millions of good paying jobs, rebuilding our bridges, ports and water systems. Up with creating millions of sustainable energy jobs to lower the cost of energy, lower carbon emissions and protect the environment.

Up with health care for all. Up with education for all. Up with home ownership. Up with guaranteed retirement benefits. Up with peace. Up with prosperity. Up with the Democratic Party. Up with Obama-Biden.

Wake up, America. Wake up, America. Wake up, America.

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I’m in love with Michelle Obama:

Hair at Shakespeare in the Park’s Delacorte Theatre is about as good as a production of Hair can be. Near-flawless. It’ll probably move to Broadway, but it won’t be the same so, if you can, get tickets before September 14th.

Patina Renea Miller in Hair. photo by Michal Daniel

I may have time to write more about both later, but no promises.

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[D]espite all its flaws, the production is quite a bit of fun. When I sat down to watch “Raised by Lesbians,” I had already seen two shows earlier that day, both of which were pretentious, and self-serious, and one of which was astonishingly bad. In that context, the modest and good-natured ambitions of “Raised by Lesbians,” coupled with fun, smartly-crafted performances from all of the actors, made for an enjoyable end to a long day.

Full review here.

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Towards the end of “Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising,” I was already feeling guilty that I was about to write a very negative review of an activist show with an admirable agenda. Then it got worse. A member of the audience stood up and declared with the stiffness of a non-actor who’s memorized her lines, “Stop this show! This woman has something to say!”

Full review here.

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