Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Here's a weird story from a British source about Palin being blessed by a Pentecostal preacher from Kenya who claims to have rid a village in Kenya of a "witch."
The pastor whose prayer Sarah Palin says helped her to become governor of Alaska founded his ministry with a witchhunt against a Kenyan woman who he accused of causing car accidents through demonic spells.
This is a long story. First, her connection to this guy:
At a speech at the Wasilla Assembly of God on June 8 this year, Mrs Palin described how Thomas Muthee had laid his hands on her when he visited the church as a guest preacher in late 2005, prior to her successful gubernatorial bid.In video footage of the speech, she is seen saying: "As I was mayor and Pastor Muthee was here and he was praying over me, and you know how he speaks and he's so bold. And he was praying "Lord make a way, Lord make a way."
"And I'm thinking, this guy's really bold, he doesn't even know what I'm going to do, he doesn't know what my plans are. And he's praying not "oh Lord if it be your will may she become governor," no, he just prayed for it. He said "Lord make a way and let her do this next step. And that's exactly what happened."
She then adds: "So, again, very very powerful, coming from this church," before the presiding pastor comments on the "prophetic power" of the event.
An African evangelist, Pastor Muthee has given guest sermons at the Wasilla Assembly of God on at least 10 occasions in his role as the founder of the Word of Faith Church, also known as the Prayer Cave.
And some details on Muthee's past:
Pastor Muthee founded the Prayer Cave in 1989 in Kiambu, Kenya after "God spoke" to him and his late wife Margaret and called him to the country, according to the church's website.The pastor speaks of his offensive against a demonic presence in the town in a trailer for the evangelical video "Transformations", made by Sentinel Group, a Christian research and information agency.
"We prayed, we fasted, the Lord showed us a spirit of witchcraft resting over the place," Pastor Muthee says.
After the spirit was broken, the crime rate dropped to almost zero and there was "explosive church growth" while almost every bar in the town closed down, the video says.
The full Transformations video featuring Pastor Muthee's story has recently been removed from YouTube but the rest of the story is detailed in a 1999 article in the Christian Science Monitor, as well as on numerous evangelical websites.
According to the Christian Science Monitor, six months of fervent prayer and research identified the source of the witchcraft as a local woman called Mama Jane, who ran a "divination" centre called the Emmanuel Clinic.
Her alleged involvement in fortune-telling and the fact that she lived near the site of a number of fatal car accidents led Pastor Muthee to publicly declare her a witch responsible for the town's ills, and order her to offer her up her soul for salvation or leave Kiambu.
Says the Monitor, "Muthee held a crusade that "brought about 200 people to Christ"." They set up round-the-clock prayer intercession in the basement of a grocery store and eventually, says the pastor "the demonic influence - the 'principality' over Kiambu -was broken", and Mama Jane fled the town.
According to accounts of the witchhunt circulated on evangelical websites such as Prayer Links Ministries, after Pastor Muthee declared Mama Jane a witch, the townspeople became suspicious and began to turn on her, demanding that she be stoned. Public outrage eventually led the police to raid her home, where they fired gunshots, killing a pet python which they believed to be a demon.
After Mama Jane was questioned by police - and released - she decided it was time to leave town, the account says.
Pastor Muthee has frequently referred to this witchhunt in his sermons as an example of the power of "spiritual warfare". In October 2005, he delivered ten sermons at the Wasilla Assembly of God, the audio of which was available on the church's website until it was removed around the time Mrs Palin's candidacy was announced. The blog Irregular Times has listings and screen grabs of the sermons.
It was during that these sermons that Mrs Palin, who was then preparing for her gubernatorial run, was anointed by Pastor Muthee. His intercession, she says, was "awesome".
Pentecostals in Kenya are also the ones trying to get the Lucy skeleton removed from the national museum, though I don't know if Muthee is directly involved with that.
Politics
Comments
This is some scary, loon we have running for high office.
Posted by: Mike | September 23, 2008 9:55 AM
How is this idiocy NOT on every TV / News /Media outlet??!!
Posted by: J-Dog | September 23, 2008 10:06 AM
Keith Olbermann has reported on this a few times on his show. Most of the news seems to be going out of their way to give McCain a free pass on many issues.
Posted by: RAM | September 23, 2008 10:22 AM
I think Palin is a grossly underqualified religious whackaloon, but this association seems pretty thin gruel -- someone whom she met once has done nutbar things she likely didn't even know about.
Posted by: Tulse | September 23, 2008 10:23 AM
RAM,
I don't have any comment on this directly. I just think it is amusing how both sides are absolutely certain that the media are in the tank for the other guy. I was just on a site where they are complaining that the MSM is refusing to write anything substantive about the Bill Ayers connection and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
Is this like the debate perception--where you are always convinced your guy won?
Posted by: heddle | September 23, 2008 10:35 AM
"while almost every bar in the town closed down"
By their fruits ye shall know them, they say....and that sounds like a bad apple to me.
Posted by: Coragyps | September 23, 2008 10:43 AM
Tulse,
I agree that this is pretty far-fetched as a story is concerned and that's probably why more of the media has not run with it, but you just flipped it the other way.
She didn't just introduce herself to him when he came to their church. You make it sound like all she did was say hello to him. She got in front of her church, praised him for his bold, demanding style of prayer and credited him with a part of her success in becoming governor. She knew who he was, which organizations he was with and spoke highly of him.
I don't think you can say she knew that he went on witchhunts, but she certainly liked his conviction that he was doing the work of God.
Posted by: Odie | September 23, 2008 10:45 AM
I just think it is amusing how both sides are absolutely certain that the media are in the tank for the other guy.
I don't find it amusing; it rather disturbs me. I do think it's like the debate perception, but I think the media exacerbate the problem by putting an opinion and spin on bloody everything. It offends me that we are able to label specific newspapers or programs as liberal or conservative. To me, if it's a news outlet, there should be nothing but the data. I realize that this is a lot like saying scientists are free of bias, but I can still dream.
Posted by: Josh | September 23, 2008 10:50 AM
I was just on a site where they are complaining that the MSM is refusing to write anything substantive about the Bill Ayers connection and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
Such complaints are false. There's been plenty of coverage of the Ayers connection, and there's just not that much to cover.
Posted by: Raging Bee | September 23, 2008 10:54 AM
RagingBee,
Well that convinces me. Case closed. Game over man. My bad-- I didn't realize the obvious resolution of the curiosity of both sides claiming media bias was: Oh, but it's so simple! We're right; the other side is lying! That's all you need to know! I mean, that's certainly a thoroughly compelling explanation. Thanks for the help.
Josh,
I'm not sure it has to be a dream. I think of people like the recently late Tim Russert. At least to me he never revealed his own political leanings. I wouldn't bet the farm as how he voted in past national elections. I can't think of another (current) big-name reporter about whom I could say the same thing.
Posted by: heddle | September 23, 2008 11:05 AM
OK, but isn't it the witchhunts that are the juicy story here? If he were just a passionate preacher, this wouldn't be news. It seems to me that unless Palin did know about his more outlandish activities, there simply isn't a story here (beyond that Palin is generally a religious whackaloon).
Posted by: Tulse | September 23, 2008 11:10 AM
Josh said:
I'd be happy to have individual news sources state their bias openly. "We hate George Bush, and here's the news." "We would never vote Republican, and here's the news." Being biased doesn't mean you can't tell the truth, but it does make it likely that you'll choose to report news that confirms that bias. At least if we know the bias up front then we can apply the appropriate filters when reading/hearing what the source has to say.
Posted by: Gretchen | September 23, 2008 11:16 AM
Tulse,
It is a very weak story, and it is about the witchhunts. I got the same thing out of it as you did. I think the only significance of her relationship is that it gives other people who find her strong faith as a plus an idea of who she worships with. I wouldn't like to be judged by that principle, but with as little as she's been willing to talk to the media, any detail (even this insignificant) is going to be what we're left looking at.
She could easily refute this relationship if it becomes a bigger story by doing the same thing Obama did with Jeremiah Wright. About the only people who still care about that weren't likely to vote for him anyway.
Posted by: Odie | September 23, 2008 11:40 AM
heddle wrote:
It's precisely like that, which is why I pay little attention to claims of media bias. Hell, I pay no attention to accusations of bias at all. Accusing someone of being biased is an extraordinarily weak argument by itself. Everyone is biased. The relevant question is whether what that person said is true or not. If their bias leads them to misstate the facts then point out the misstatement of facts. If their bias doesn't lead them to do so and the statement is true then the accusation of bias is irrelevant.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | September 23, 2008 11:44 AM
Bias in the media isn't going to go away. Often with politics, the story cannot be presented without bias. When McCain says X, that can start a news story about how X is false. To not run the story can be biased for McCain, but to run the story is going to be interpretted as biased against McCain. To fully explain both sides of whether X may technically be true or false may take 40 minutes, and no news show is going to devote that kind of time to it.
There's also the idea that balance could ever be achieved because candidates mislead as much as they think they can get away with, and there is never a point where both sides are equally at fault in being deceptive.
Posted by: Odie | September 23, 2008 11:52 AM
Just to be clear, I wasn't trying to insinuate that bias in the media would or could go away. I should probably have not thrown in the snarky flip about science and bias.
I wasn't really talking about media bias so much as spin. As Gretchen and Ed wrote, everyone has a bias and you can be biased and still tell the "truth" (in quotes because reporting, like science, is asymptotic to truth with a capital T). But telling the "truth" doesn't require you to put a spin on your data. That is a conscious choice that I see as distinct from the bias itself (and is what I was cranking about).
Posted by: Josh | September 23, 2008 12:09 PM
Shorter heddle: [noun] [verb] [tu quoque].
Posted by: StuV | September 23, 2008 12:16 PM
Ed said:
"The relevant question is whether what that person said is true or not. If their bias leads them to misstate the facts then point out the misstatement of facts. If their bias doesn't lead them to do so and the statement is true then the accusation of bias is irrelevant.
True enough.
I would add to Ed's statement that there is more to media bias than just whether a particular source's story is factual or not. There are the considerations of the stories that do get run, how long they run, and perhaps most importantly, the stories that do NOT get run.
How often, say, a particular outlet decided to mention John Edward's haircut, or Al Gore's bedtime song, or the "issue" of Whitewater investment is important. That an outlet never ran a story on, say, specific McCain gaffes, or Clinton's antiterrorism actions is telling.
And, these sorts of omissions and commissions can be quantified. The sources that I have seen which HAVE quantified them are liberal sources (like FAIR or Media Matters). And they show definitively that the media is biased to favor Republicans.
Both sides may grouse about media bias, and both might be right. Perhaps the right has good data to suggest that the media is "liberal", but I doubt it. Four years of Clinton's cock on every paper in the country does not a liberal media make.
Posted by: Gingerbaker | September 23, 2008 12:21 PM
But bias increases the probability of making untrue statements, and you don't always have the time and resources to determine if every statement is true. I interpret, "X is biased," as, "X has incentive to lie or mislead. Be more skeptical of X if they don't provide proof."
Posted by: Brandon | September 23, 2008 12:24 PM
Regurgitated StuV,
"I don't actually know what tu quoque means, but I'll use this this way: no fair to point out both sides claim media bias when I want to live in the fantasy world where only one side can legitimately make the claim!"
Posted by: heddle | September 23, 2008 12:27 PM
Heddle, Yes re: your thoughts on Tim Russert. With him gone I'm left largely with Bill Moyers who I think I can trust.
Posted by: Josh | September 23, 2008 12:32 PM
heddle:
"I'm not sure it has to be a dream. I think of people like the recently late Tim Russert. At least to me he never revealed his own political leanings"
That's because when he was leaning you were leaning with him, to the right.
shortest heddle:
"I'm right, anyone who disagrees with me is wrong. This is the inerrant word of GOD, speaking through me."
Posted by: democommie | September 23, 2008 12:39 PM
heddle, you are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts. The main-stream media (cable news especially) is objectively tilted to favor corporate and Republican issues. Case in point: go look up who is sponsoring Friday's debate on CNN.
Also, have a lozenge. You're getting a little screechy.
Posted by: StuV | September 23, 2008 1:29 PM
StuV,
Ah, the main stream media is objectively tilted to favor Republicans. How about that? And evidence of this is to be had by examining the sponsor of the debate. Clearly.
•Fox is objectively tilted to the Republicans. (OK, I'll grant that.)
•MSNBC is objectively tilted to the Republicans (barf).
•CBS is objectively tilted to the Republicans. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
•PBS is objectively tilted to the Republicans. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
•NBC is objectively tilted to the Republicans. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
•ABC is objectively tilted to the Republicans. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
•the Washington Post is objectively tilted to the Republicans. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
•the New York Times is objectively tilted to the Republicans. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
Color me unimpressed with such an argument.
Posted by: heddle | September 23, 2008 1:51 PM
sorry stuV, but i actually work in the dreaded msm and while i won't defend it's clear excesses, you're off base about advertising. most places i've work, i've never been in the same room -- sometimes the same building -- as ad staff. i bet most of the debate moderators couldn't even tell you who the advertisers were.
Posted by: khefera | September 23, 2008 2:02 PM
its not it's. boy is my face red.
Posted by: khefera | September 23, 2008 2:05 PM
khefera: Fair enough -- only Fox has proven to be news-by-edict.
heddle: Tell you what. Watch the BBC or FSTV for a day and then flip back.
Posted by: StuV | September 23, 2008 2:13 PM
Heddle's just jealous that he didn't get to drive the witch out.
Posted by: steve s | September 23, 2008 2:39 PM
heddle says:
"Ah, the main stream media is objectively tilted to favor Republicans. How about that? And evidence of this is to be had by examining the sponsor of the debate. Clearly.
•Fox is objectively tilted to the Republicans. (OK, I'll grant that.)
•MSNBC is objectively tilted to the Republicans (barf).
•CBS is objectively tilted to the Republicans. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
•PBS is objectively tilted to the Republicans. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
•NBC is objectively tilted to the Republicans. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
•ABC is objectively tilted to the Republicans. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
•the Washington Post is objectively tilted to the Republicans. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
•the New York Times is objectively tilted to the Republicans. Quod Erat Demonstrandum."
and because he speaks it is so.
Posted by: democommie | September 23, 2008 3:00 PM
heddle wrote: " MSM is refusing to write anything substantive about the Bill Ayers connection and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge."
There's nothing to that. It wasn't just Obama and Ayers, there were also a number of upright pillars of Chicago society, on the left and the right. Somehow we're supposed to believe that, magically, Obama was the only one to be tainted by participation on a board with Ayers, but the Republicans were untainted?
Sorry, that's the breaks. It's a non-story.
Posted by: Jon H | September 23, 2008 3:44 PM
Jon H,
Perhaps not intentionally or with malice aforethought, but nevertheless that's a quote mine. You have made it look as if that is my position, when in fact my post makes it clear that I was on another site (National Review, as it turns out) that claimed such a bias--the point I was making being that both sides see media bias.
steve s,
That would be wicked cool.Posted by: heddle | September 23, 2008 3:51 PM
khefera:
Of course not. But you don't have to be -- you have the same bosses.
Posted by: Nemo | September 23, 2008 4:00 PM
heddle -
I'm not sure what you mean by both sides. No doubt there are supporters on each side who feel that way. But only the McCain campaign is spewing crap like this:You've got to love the last line, a pre-claim of bias for any NY Times article written in the future.Posted by: Taz | September 23, 2008 5:41 PM
Can anyone else think of a VP nominee who hadn't given a single press conference a month after being picked? I don't think it's happened before in my lifetime. Oct 2 is going to be a disaster for the McCain/Palin ticket.
Posted by: steve s | September 23, 2008 5:48 PM
Because, perhaps, there's nothing substantive there?
Going through the Annenberg report, there are pages and pages of material that supports such radical measures as...changing the teachers' union....empowering parents to deal with principals...getting parents involved with their children's schooling.
Your turn. Find SOMETHING.
Posted by: gwangung | September 23, 2008 5:51 PM
steve s:
Maybe, but I'm not so sure. Just today: (paraphrasing)
Bidenism du jour
Biden: The 'McCain is computer illiterate' ad was terrible, I didn't approve of it! (Note end of ad: I am Barack Obama, and I approve of this ad.)
Obama: *smack* Joe, not so fast.
Bidenism du jour, part deux:
Biden: No Coal Plants in America!
Obama: *smack* I support clean coal plants (and Joe, in case you didn't notice, I'd like to carry Pennsylvania.)
Bidenism du jour. The Trifecta:
Biden, to Katie Couric: "When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'"
Um, that'd be Hoover. On the radio.
He's the gift that keeps on giving.
Posted by: heddle | September 23, 2008 7:07 PM
The witch-hunter part of Ms. Palin is just the tip of the iceberg. She is a religious fanatic who not just believes in the End Times but thinks Alaska will play a big part in it. She associates with like-minded radicals. She fits into their world view and they know that if McCain is elected that she will wind up president (or de facto president if he becomes ill and doesn't die), hence their renewed support of McCain, someone they all said NO WAY to before he selected Palin.
Read this post and watch all of the videos. She associates with the likes of the Master's Commission and the Third Wave. The Master's Commission's own website states violence and a radical relationship with God. Her own words at a MC ceremony along with a MC pastor espousing glory of the end times and how Alaska will be a refuge to those who survive the end times are telling of just how much of a radical fundamentalist she is and how frightened all of us should be.
If you take the time to read the post (the link above) and watch all 12 of the videos, you will be TRULY TERRIFIED should this woman attain any high public office.
Posted by: MsJoanne | September 23, 2008 7:14 PM
heddle wrote:
LOL. Well, at least he didn't say the founding fathers said it.
Posted by: Leni | September 23, 2008 9:11 PM
"Biden:...,I didn't approve of it! (Note end of ad: I'm Barack Obama, and I approve of this ad").
So Joe Biden and Barack Obama are literally the same person? How does Barack Obama approving of an ad contradict Biden saying that he didn't approve of it?
Posted by: daniel rotter | September 23, 2008 9:33 PM
Leni, Hoover didn't say it either.
Posted by: mothergross | September 24, 2008 12:26 AM
Take it up with heddle. It's his comment. It was just more Palin fodder for me. I could not care less who, if anyone, said it.
Also, you don't need to sock puppet here, "mothergross".
Ed probably doesn't yet know you're a troll. So at this point, pretending to be someone else is just sort of... stupid.
Posted by: Leni | September 24, 2008 1:46 AM
Leni, is there a difference between pretending to be someone else and pretending to be something else? is Leni not a pseudonym to cover the pretense of erudition?
Posted by: mothergross | September 24, 2008 9:56 PM