Tell Congress to get serious about fair elections

National Campaign For Fair Elections :

On Tuesday, a group of retired nuns in South Bend, Indiana were turned away from a polling place by sisters from their own convent because, at 80 and 90 years of age, they no longer have the photo ID’s required by an Indiana law recently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The story has received a lot of attention but the truth is, the problem with our elections isn’t voter fraud. It’s the barriers that have been erected to the ballot box, both intentionally and unintentionally, like deception and intimidation, under-trained poll workers, defective voter registration systems, and breakdowns in election machinery. It’s time for Congress to get serious about fair elections – and get to work.

Tell your members of congress to address the real problems with our democracy by supporting The Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act, and the Caging Prohibition Act.

McCain’s Vote in 2000 Is Revived in a Ruckus

New York Times:

"Ms. Huffington, the liberal blogger, said she had heard Mr. McCain say at a Los Angeles dinner party shortly after the 2000 election that he had not voted for the president he has now publicly embraced in his own quest for the White House. The McCain campaign swiftly quashed the account and said Ms. Huffington had a book to promote and would make anything up.

“She’s a flake and a poser and an attention-seeking diva,” Mark Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest aides, told The Washington Post."


All of that is likely true, but it does not itself constitute much of a denial.
Of course, McCain could have been lying to the Hollywood folks at the party.
So like much in politics, the question resolves to, "Was he lying then, or is he lying now?"
One wouldn't want to exclude prematurely the possibility of both.

Michael Walzer on Israel at 60

APN :: Recommended Readings:

"Over many years, Western Liberals and Leftists have not had great success at foreign policy. Their strength lies at home, and many of them probably believe that the best foreign policy is a democratic and egalitarian domestic policy. I wish that my friends in Israel could be good liberals and leftists in this old fashioned way. I wish that they could focus their energies over the next decades on reducing the inequalities of Israeli society, improving the quality of state education, separating religion and politics, addressing the rift between Israeli Jews and Arabs, facing up to environmental problems. Surely some of them will work on these and other internal issues some of the time, and so they should. But the hard truth is that the major challenge facing Israel at 60 won't be solved even by the best imaginable domestic policy.

The major challenge, as everyone knows, has to do with war and peace—but also, more specifically, given Hezbollah rocketry in the summer of 2006 and the daily rocketing of Sderot, it has to do with physical security. Israel is immensely strong and immensely vulnerable, and that combination is very hard to think about." ...

As Executions Resume, So Do Questions of Fairness

New York Times:

"John Holdridge, director of the A.C.L.U. Capital Punishment Project, which provided representation for Mr. Jones, said the successful appeals showed that the problem with the death penalty was not the method of execution — the issue ruled on by the Supreme Court last month — but instead “poor people getting lousy lawyers.”

“All these states are gearing up to start executing people again, and nobody seems to be concerned about these systemic problems,” Mr. Holdridge said."

After 60 Years, Arabs in Israel Are Outsiders - New York Times

New York Times:

"For most Israelis, Jewish identity is central to the nation, the reason they are proud to live here, the link they feel with history. But Israeli Arabs, including the most successfully integrated ones, say a new identity must be found for the country’s long-term survival."

Panel Subpoenas Close Cheney Aide - New York Times

Panel Subpoenas Close Cheney Aide - New York Times:

...The panel, the House Judiciary subcommittee on the constitution, civil rights and civil liberties, took the action at a hearing on Tuesday. During the session, law professors called for a full investigation by Congress or by an independent commission of the adoption of the harsh techniques.

Philippe Sands, a British law professor and author of a new book on the approval of coercive interrogation by high-level American military officials, “Torture Team,” said that if no such inquiry took place in the United States, foreign prosecutors might seek to charge American officials with authorizing torture. He said two foreign prosecutors, whom he did not name, had asked him for the materials on which his book is based.

“If the U.S. doesn’t address this, other countries will,” Mr. Sands said....

Marty Peretz on Hillary's common touch

THE NEW REPUBLIC | Blogs:

...The leader also inspires followers. How's this for civilized political discourse? 'She makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy,' said one of her endorsers, Governor Michael F. Easley. I thought we Democrats don't talk like that any more. Or another revealing citation, this one from a labor leader also endorsing Hillary, praising her 'testicular fortitude.' My God, and I had just about stopped using the word 'seminal.'

This degradation of discourse and behavior is part and parcel of her attempt at appearing like what she thinks of as common. Is this the learning she envisions in 'It Takes a Village'? It certainly isn't what she called eons ago 'the politics of meaning.'...

Using race to divide us

newsobserver.com :

Does Clinton really think that Obama is unpatriotic or racist or divisive? If so, she should say that directly and let him defend himself against the charge. But we all know that is not her personal belief; Wright is just another loaded code word or phrase, like 'welfare queen.' Clinton is using him to divide; to gain political advantage among white Democrats, even at the expense of offending or turning off many African-Americans, one of the Democratic Party's most loyal blocs of voters.

Clinton's husband did the same thing in 1993, when he unceremoniously dumped Lani Guinier after nominating her to be assistant attorney general for civil rights. Guinier was attacked by right-wing Republicans as a 'quota queen' because of some things she had written about voting rights that were intended to move us beyond racial politics and force coalition-building among voters based on shared interests, not race....

More important, however, nothing that Wright has said has anything to do with whether Obama should be president. The fact that Clinton has so aggressively exploited Wright in her campaign is only a reflection of her unfitness to be a president who unites us.

Even if she were nominated by the Democrats and elected president, her personal triumph would have been at the cost of four more years of political and likely racial divisiveness. That seems too high a price to pay, for the Democrats or the country.

(James E. Coleman Jr. is a professor at Duke University's law school.)

Gidi Grinstein on Zionism

...The secret of Zionism—the resilience of Zionism—is its ideological agility. Zionism has been driven by… ideas that are inconsistent with each other. So Zionism has been and remains a balancing act.

First I'd like to give you the concept. If there was rigidity in Zionism, there would be no way Zionism could survive the tremendous turmoil of the last sixty or seventy years. But these ideas are not in a hierarchy with each other--they are on a platform, they have equal footing and in every window of time there is a realignment of these ideas to meet the challenges of the day with new priorities.

What are these ideas? First there is the commitment to a special place on the face of this Earth—the land of Israel, the cradle of our civilization. The second big idea was about security for Jews. The third was about the well being of Jews. Not necessarily about wealth but more about economic independence, economic self determination. Then it was a whole nexus of ideas about humanism, liberalism, democracy. The Zionist movement since its inception has been democratic to a fault. That is still reflected and projected into the Knesset, which is a highly ineffective body.

It was about leadership among the family of nations—tikkun olam—repairing the world. It was about being light unto the nations, and the quest to create a model society. It has been about the Jewish character of the state of Israel—which means its language, its national day of rest, the Shabbat, its national holidays. This is the only place on the face of this earth where Jews experience being a majority. We assume full responsibility. This is a radically different existence than being a minority—as economically and politically powerful as a minority can be. Here we take care of sewage, we're responsible for security.

Unforgiven

From The Atlantic, by Jeffrey Goldberg:

"David Grossman, like most of Israel’s leftists, sees binationalism as simultaneously utopian and dismissive of Jewish feelings. “You know, binationalism doesn’t work in so many places in the world,” he said. “You see it in Belgium now. And they expect, with this really hateful combination of Jews and Arabs, that it will succeed here? It’s so wrong. Part of the cure for the historical distortions of both peoples is that they need a place of their own with defined borders. We have to heal separately. I’m a little suspicious of these people who would experiment on us with binationalism.”

Reality, he said, has made a Jewish state necessary. “Since the world has failed to defend Jewish existence, there is a need for a place for the Jews to implement their culture and their values and their language and their history, a place in which to recover.”"

Bill Moyers on Wright and Obama

...Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering Catholic-bashing Texas preacher who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee's delusions, or thinks AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11 Jerry Falwell said the attack was God's judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass.

Jon Stewart recently played a tape from the Nixon White House in which Billy Graham talks in the oval office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America. This is crazy; this is wrong -- white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren't.

Which means it is all about race, isn't it? Wright's offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn't fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone's neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettle some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship. We are often exposed us to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I've never seen anything like this ? this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner before our very eyes. Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said "beware the terrible simplifiers".

Jeff Greenfield on Obama and Orwell

From Slate:

..."Everyone who uses his brain knows that Socialism, is a way out [of the worldwide depression,]" Orwell writes. "It would at least ensure our getting enough to eat, even if it deprived us of everything else. Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such an elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already." And yet, he adds, "the average thinking person nowadays is merely not a Socialist, he is actively hostile to Socialism. … Socialism … has about it something inherently distasteful—something that drives away the very people who ought to be flocking it its support."

One key to the movement's lack of popularity, Orwell argues, is its supporters. "As with the Christian religion," he writes, "the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents." Then he wheels out the heavy rhetorical artillery. The typical socialist, according to Orwell, "is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism, or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler, and often with vegetarian leanings … with a social position he has no intention of forfeiting. … One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England." (Think "organic food lover," "militant nonsmoker," and "environmentalist with a private jet" for a more contemporary list.)...

Iran Protests to U.N. About Clinton Comments

New York Times:

"On Tuesday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran told reporters during a trip to New Delhi, the Indian capital, that he believed that neither Mrs. Clinton nor Senator Barack Obama, the other Democratic presidential candidate, had a chance of winning the election.

“Do you think a black candidate would be allowed to be president in the U.S.?” he asked, the semiofficial Mehr News Agency reported. “We don’t think Mr. Obama will be allowed to become the U.S. president.”"

Cubans Buy First Computers In Latest Change

New York Times:

"They saved for four years in hopes of one day getting a computer and, at the end, needed a loan from his sister to make it possible.

Amanda...will not be using the computer to surf the Internet, which is still not available for most Cubans.

'We don't have Internet. We don't have a telephone,' Fresnedo said."

For Exxon Mobil, $10.9 Billion Profit Disappoints -

From The New York Times:

Exxon Mobil, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, said Thursday that its first-quarter net income rose 17 percent, boosted by surging oil prices.

But even as it posted the second-most profitable quarter in its history, Exxon’s earnings managed to disappoint investors... Shares closed down $3.37, to $89.70, on a day the Dow industrial average rose 189.87 points. ...

UF to scan student, faculty e-mail in admissions leak

From The Gainesville Sun :

The University of Florida has launched a privacy investigation, looking for students and faculty members who may have leaked confidential information about a controversial admissions decision.

UF's Privacy Office is questioning members of UF's Medical Selection Committee and also searching through student and faculty e-mail for evidence of illegal disclosures of private student information, according to officials. ...

The investigation launched by UF is in part the result of stories that ran in The Sun in April, discussing the admission of a student who did not have the support of the committee that traditionally handles admissions decisions.

The student, Benjamin Mendelsohn, did not have basic qualifications, having never taken the Medical College Admissions Test, or MCAT, according to three members of the selection committee and two other sources close to the situation.

Mendelsohn is the son of a major Republican fundraiser, and a prior application he sent to UF's medical school contained letters of recommendation from Gov. Charlie Crist and Sen. President Ken Pruitt, R-Port St. Lucie.

Dr. Bruce Kone, dean of UF's College of Medicine, says he overruled the committee because the student was 'exceptional.'

[AJW: That the student, and the circumstances, are "exceptional" goes without saying in circumstances like these. The more interesting question is the respect in which they are exceptional. And launching a blunderbuss investigation of everyone's email is a sure recipe for notoriety and humiliation of the institution and its "quite exceptional" dean. Or maybe everyone in Florida is utterly without shame on such matters?]

And from an April 10 story, same journalist and newspaper:

Dr. Lewis Baxter, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience in the college, has called on Machen to allow for the Faculty Senate to conduct an independent review of Mendelsohn's credentials to determine how he stacked up against other applicants.

In response to an e-mail from Baxter requesting an independent Faculty Senate inquiry, [UF President] Machen said he was satisfied with the student's credentials and hoped his own assessment would "suffice."

Absent an independent vetting, however, Baxter says he's not satisfied that UF can assure the public that Kone didn't play favorites with a student whose family is politically connected.

"Like Sen. Joe McCarthy, Dean Kone won't show the evidence; he just asserts he has it, and demands others accept his assertion," Baxter wrote in an e-mail.

"This whole thing stinks like a rotten fish, and the university just can't afford this," added Baxter, who completed his undergraduate degree at Yale University and his medical degree at UF. "We just can't appear this way."

Baxter added that he was disappointed his colleagues haven't spoken out publicly about the issue.

"The faculty here, some of them could care less, and a lot of them are just scared," he said.

Several faculty members who contacted The Sun said they feared what might happen to their careers if they were publicly critical of the dean's actions. As evidenced by his Friday e-mail, Kone has openly criticized those with whom he disagrees - even [President] Machen's own staff.

And yet another:

"Two plus two equals five for
sufficiently large values of two."

From another friend:

"You Can Never Be Lost If You Don't Care Where You Are"

From a friend:

"There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who
understand binary and those who don't."

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1460906593/bctid1482434988

Gay Men Breaking Ground at a Jewish Seminary

New York Times:

"While the centrist Conservative denomination in its middle-of-the-road way operates with three different policies on ordaining gay men and lesbians — two opposed and one in favor — the facts have been established, probably irreversibly. Even before J.T.S. made its decision, the Conservative movement’s other major seminary, the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in Los Angeles, had done so.

Conservative Judaism reached a similar juncture a generation ago when it first admitted women as candidates for the rabbinate. Mr. Weininger was born in the same year, 1985, when J.T.S. ordained its first female rabbi, Amy Eilberg. In the months just before he won admission to the seminary, he happened to bump into Rabbi Eilberg at a synagogue in Jerusalem and solicited her advice.

“I encouraged him to remember that since he is a pioneer, some people will project onto him feelings and assumptions that they have about ‘the cause,’ ” Rabbi Eilberg recalled of their conversation in an e-mail message. “As hard as it is not to take others’ criticisms and attacks personally — since they are personal — it is essential to work at remembering that this is about the larger issue.”"

Borowitz on "The Great Debate"

Gibson Trounces Stephanopolous in Crucial Debate

Asks Twice as Many ‘Gotcha’ Questions as TV Rival

In what many considered a must-win contest for the two ABC News personalities, Charles Gibson handed rival George Stephanopolous a resounding defeat in last night’s televised debate.

With over ten million viewers watching, the stakes were high for the two ABC rivals to see who could pepper the candidates with the most so-called “gotcha” questions.

Gibson drew blood first, smothering the presidential candidates with so many trick questions that he immediately seemed to put Stephanopolous on the defensive.

An aide to Gibson later summed up the secret to the ABC anchor’s decisive victory: “He didn’t let the candidates talk too much, and he made sure that this debate would be about Charles Gibson and nothing but Charles Gibson.”

The clear losers: ABC News and the American public.

“It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.”

Arnold Eisen, Chancellor of Jewish Theological Seminary, quoting Abraham Joshua Heschel

Unintelligible sentence of the week

Carole King, Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell: Sheila Weller’s ‘Girls Like Us’ Weaves a Tapestry of Rock Queens - New York Times: By Janet Maslin

"At long last it’s time to acknowledge that even if women who enjoyed “that glamorous little wedge” of early 1970s feminism — “between the fiercely anti-‘sex object’ early feminism and the so-called padded-shoulder ‘power suit’ feminism of later years” — would have cited Billie Holiday as a great female artist, it was Ms. Simon “whose life and issues more closely matched most of their own.”

Michelle Obama on Elitism

New York Times Blog:

"HAVERFORD, Pa. — Michelle Obama, appearing at Haverford College, gave a strong response to criticism that her husband’s remarks at a San Francisco fund-raising event were elitist.

“There’s a lot of people talking about elitism and all of that,” she told a gathering of students and townspeople on Tuesday, alluding to controversial remarks that Senator Barack Obama made at a San Francisco fund-raiser. “Yeah, I went to Princeton and Harvard, but the lens through which I see the world is the lens that I grew up with. I am the product of a working-class upbringing. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a working-class community.”

Then, referring to her husband’s student loans, she added sarcastically: “Now when is the last time you’ve seen a president of the United States who just paid off his loan debt? But, again, maybe I’m out of touch.”"

For those who have been waiting:

Bruce Springsteen News:

"Dear Friends and Fans:

LIke most of you, I've been following the campaign and I have now seen and heard enough to know where I stand. Senator Obama, in my view, is head and shoulders above the rest.

He has the depth, the reflectiveness, and the resilience to be our next President. He speaks to the America I've envisioned in my music for the past 35 years, a generous nation with a citizenry willing to tackle nuanced and complex problems, a country that's interested in its collective destiny and in the potential of its gathered spirit. A place where '...nobody crowds you, and nobody goes it alone.'

At the moment, critics have tried to diminish Senator Obama through the exaggeration of certain of his comments and relationships. While these matters are worthy of some discussion, they have been ripped out of the context and fabric of the man's life and vision, so well described in his excellent book, Dreams of My Father, often in order to distract us from discussing the real issues: war and peace, the fight for economic and racial justice, reaffirming our Constitution, and the protection and enhancement of our environment."