May 2009 Archives

This just in, tragically. Now we'll have to see how it's handled by pro-life forces.

Muslims have been told to push aside their extremists more vigorously than they have, as I myself wrote here. Many Muslims say they've done their best to do so.

But that doesn't always come out clearly, given how many Muslims share the grievances of terrorists -- grievances about how Palestinians are treated, grievances about US interventions globally, etc.

Many Westerners act as though Muslims can condemn the terror adequately only if they renounce those shared grievances. That's asking a lot. Muslims detest the tactics of their extremists, but they find it hard not to care about the same issues.

Now, a pro-lifer has killed a doctor in violation of standards of Western civilization. Pro-life people will now face a similar dilemma as Muslims. By finding it hard to renounce the grievance that they share with the Operation Rescue crowd, I'm betting that they'll come under criticism from, say, David Long on this board, for seeming to condone the terror.

Should be an interesting discussion. I hope it enables the religious right, which has been eager to denounce all Muslims as thugs, to feel a little empathy.

When all is said and done, it's not surprising that Susan Boyle placed second in "Britain's Got Talent." Although there are som reports about a wrong number that was accidentally posted on U-Tube, Boyle made some missteps that just about anyone would have taken.

One was because she probably felt the pressure from all that instant fame she didn't do as well on her second performance as she did on her first. While her first performance was fun and spontaneous, her second one looked like work, though to be honest, most people would have a hard time relaxing under that kind of pressure.

Probably because of criticism from her second performance where she sang "Memories" from "Cats," she decided to play it safe and chose "I Dreamed a Dream" once again for her finale. Another song showcasing her talent would have been a better pick, but I'm just going to have to wait for her CD to arrive in stores.

The Gay activists that picketed President Obama at a recent fundraising event in Los Angeles for allegedly not doing and saying enough to beat back Proposition 8 must have dropped in from another planet. Obama remains wildly popular among African-American voters and an attack on him for being less than resolute on gay rights does nothing but further tick black voters off. They'll need those voters now more than ever if they plop another initiative on the ballot in 2010. The measure would reverse Proposition 8 and legalize same sex marriage.

The Catholic Church and the Mormon groups dumped millions into the Proposition 8 initiative campaign. Yet even with their money and their drum beat media campaign, polls showed that Latinos marginally supported the proposition, Asians voted overwhelmingly against it and whites were split. Polls also showed that a majority of black voters in key parts of the state voted for it. Los Angeles was one. Nearly sixty percent of blacks backed the initiative. The black vote made the crucial difference in passing the initiative.
A well-heeled and probably well paid off core of preachers who head fundamentalist leaning, mega and medium-sized black churches held rallies and took to their pulpits and bible thumped their congregations to pass the initiative. Proposition 8 backers shrewdly flooded mailboxes in mostly black neighborhoods with a mailer that featured a stern faced Obama and his horribly out of context quote saying that he opposed gay marriage. Obama vehemently denounced Proposition 8.

Even if the ministers hadn't said a word about gay marriage, a significant number maybe even the majority of blacks might still have voted for it. The warning signs that black voters were susceptible to religious and conservative pitches to oppose gay marriage lit up in 1997. Then the late Green Bay Packers perennial all-pro defensive end Reggie White, an ordained fundamentalist minister stirred a firestorm when he took a huge swipe at gay rights and gay marriage in a speech to the Wisconsin state legislature. White became the first celebrity black evangelical to say publicly what many black religious leaders said and believed privately about gay issues. Few blacks joined in the loud chorus that condemned his remarks.

A year before White's outburst, a Pew Poll measured black attitudes toward gay marriage and found that blacks by an overwhelming margin opposed it. A CNN poll eight years later showed that anti-gay attitudes among blacks had not changed much since then. At a tightly packed press conference in October 2003, five of Michigan's top black prelates publicly called on the state legislature to amend the state constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman. The ballot measure passed in November, and more than fifty percent of blacks backed it.

The same year the conservative Virginia-based Alliance for Marriage corralled a handful of top black preachers to plop their name on the Alliance's letterhead and tout the Alliance's anti-gay rights agenda.

At the NAACP convention in July 2004, there was some talk of taking a delegate vote to put the organization firmly on record backing gay rights. It didn't get far. Reverend Julius Caesar Hope, the head of the NAACP's religious affairs department, warned that a resolution to back gay marriage "would make some serious problems. I would think the membership would be overwhelmingly against it, based on our tradition in the black community."

Seven months before the November 2004 presidential election, a legion of black churchmen staged a rally on Capitol Hill, "We believed that we are faced with a challenge," Bishop Paul Morton thundered to the crowd, "God versus same-sex marriage and we will not compromise in that area." A day later an AME convention forbade its ministers from performing same-sex marriages.

In nearly every state since then where gay marriage bans have been enacted, conservative church-influenced blacks have been the driving force backing the bans. Christian fundamentalist groups have played hard on that sentiment.
At the same time, however, a significant percent of blacks have rejected the bigoted, narrow religious appeals of some black ministers and opposed gay marriage bans. Even in the winning Proposition 8 campaign, forty percent of black voters overall opposed the initiative. Many, perhaps the majority of blacks, can be won to back same sex marriage as a paramount civil rights issue. Because that's what it is. But picketing President Obama is the absolute wrong way to get them to do that.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, "The Hutchinson Report" can be heard on weekly in Los Angeles at 9:30 AM Fridays on KTYM Radio 1460 AM and live streamed nationally on ktym.com

This HuffPo column is my attempt to bring a realist's approach to peacemaking.

According to hard-liners on the right, Judge Sonia Sotomayor is an emotionally overwrought, non-intellectual, racist bigot, a benifactrix of gender preference and ethnically based affirmative action. In other words, they don't like her. This caricature is neither factual nor substantive. She is, in fact, a Summa Cum Laude graduate of Princeton and a Yale Law Review editor. You may not like her, but a dummy she ain't.

As to the deeper issue of whether biography is destiny, there is, at least, a question which is not automatically offensive--it has unfortunately been posed so far in a fairly offensive manner. In the best of all possible worlds, which this is not, our courts could be all white or black or Catholic or Jewish or Asian or Hispanic. Ethnicity and gender would not make a difference. In this imperfect world, I believe that having diversity of biography, experience, ethnicity and gender broadens our perspective and grants the court the opportunity for fresh insight. Sotomayor acknowledges her background as a factor, as part of who she is, but then says that it is her job to get past it.

Do I think there should be a Jewish seat, a Black seat, and a woman's seat? Should we always have at least one WASP, one Catholic, and one Jew? No. We should not have quotas, but we should look in places where we have not traditionally looked. We should look at our patterns and ask if we are keeping good people off the bench because of race, gender, religion or ethnicity. We should not elevate incompetents based on race or religion. But surely, in this great land of ours, there are qualified blacks, Hispanics and women in numbers that look a little more like our nation.

At the moment, we have seven white men--four of whom are Catholic. We have one black and one and a half Jews--all of Ruth Bader-Ginsberg and Brier before he converted. It is just possible that Sonia Sotomayor could add something to the bench. And no, even though Catholics are over-represented as a percentage of our population, her religion should not count against. However, pro-choice women may sleep restlessly.

As for her so-called radical decisions. Well, they are not radical. Her call, as part of an appellate panel, on the firemen having the results of the promotion test thrown out by the city, was not based on the merits of the test. It was a narrow decision on whether the city had the right to set the test aside. It was not if the test was good or fair. It was not if the city was smart or stupid. It was if they constitutionally could do what they did.

This is, in fact, exactly what conservatives say that they want judges to do--not go beyond the question, the four corners of the law and expand their decisions. This is exactly, incidentally--to open another can of worms--what the California Supreme Court did with Proposition 8. They did not judge if allowing same sex marriage was a good idea or bad. They did not judge if the proposition was smart or kind or really mean. They simply tried the question if the proposition was valid, if the people had the right to amend our State Constitution or if such an issue needed legislative approval. They found that the people had the right--not that the people were either right or wrong.

But back to Sotomayor. She will be confirmed--barring an unpaid nanny. The Republicans will continue to do themselves damage. They cannot win national elections without blacks and Hispanics--and many blacks and Hispanics are social conservatives. They were a large part of the vote that passed Prop 8. To fight this fight in a demeaning and mean-spirited tone is wrong morally and politically. Fight on the issues and if you pick up quotes, make sure that they are fundamentally different from what Justice Alito said at his confirmation hearing--how his history and the discrimination his Italian immigrant Catholic ancestors suffered informs his life. Pick something different from what Scalia said about how "Laws are made at the appellate level."

Finally, on both the right and left: Be prepared for surprises--some good and some bad. History shows that Supreme Court Justices are not very predictable.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

Whether or not anyone approves of Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme Court justice is by now a moot point because whatever BO wants, BO gets. But if I were in Congress, then I would cast one long "nay" in her direction. You know that statue of Lady Justice? If Sotomayor were there, she would be peaking underneath the blindfold.

The first clue is based on a now oft-repeated quote "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion (as a judge) than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

What hubris, what arrogance. That would be like saying that all women jurors would empathize with rape victims, which has not always been the case. Some women jurors have said the victim was asking for it, which then blows Sotomayor's reasoning out of the water. While it is true that only those from ethnic groups who have suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous discrimination often have a better idea of what it is like to walk in their shoes then those who haven't, though not always.

The second one is how she ruled in Ricci, v. De Stefono where the black firefighters in Connecticut tested lower than their white counterparts and were therefore ineligible for promotions. Part of her thinking was that it fosters job discrimination, but how could it if everyone was privy to the same information before the test? A better way around that whole snafu would have been to make the test part of the promotion process in addition to job performance or to find out why the black firefighters did more poorly and attack the problem that way.

In the end, do I think that Sotomayor will be approved? That would be akin to asking if the Lincoln Tunnel was named for Lincoln. Just be prepared for this country to move in the same direction it has been paddling along in for the past twenty years.

(Earl and Jonathan, where are you?)

Let me go out on a limb and guess that the now-famous "reverse racist" quote will not haunt Sonia Sotomayor to the degree that the media is implying. That quote is, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Is that racism? Not to me. It's like someone telling you that, because he's traveled around the world, he hopes he has a broader perspective than someone like you who stays home all the time. It may be annoying, but there's truth there.

People who have grown up across cultures have a perspective that others don't. I don't think it's any more complicated or offensive than that.

When did Americans become so frightened? When did we lose confidence in ourselves, our system of justice and our resiliency? I guess the answer is: 9-11. No longer protected by our two shinning seas, we felt suddenly vulnerable--and of course we were and are vulnerable. In this we join the rest of the world.

Bombs have been going off in England since WWII and continued with Irish Republican Army terrorist blasts and now there is Muslim terror and there have been multiple bombings. But they do not quake in fear. In Italy there was a Red Brigade. In Germany the Bader Meinhoff Gang--all well before Al Qaeda and Hezbollah sponsored terrorism. In Spain, the ETA, the Basque separatist organization has been blowing people up for a couple of decades, and Al Qaeda wreaked terror on Madrid. But all these governments and people go on with their lives and do not seem to run away from their laws and traditions. It is not that they are unafraid. Courage is not the lack of fear; it is living despite the fear.

Israel, which has been under relentless attacks of bombs and rockets for decades, goes about its day-to-day business. People walk, shop, go to pizza parlors, enjoy the beach and live their lives. Israel arrests terrorists, tries them, jails them and then often trades them for dead Israeli soldiers. In other words, they release proven enemy combatants back to the enemy. They have some sense that some, or even many, of these former prisoners will come back at them with acts of violence. After all, they are sending them home--only miles from Israel.

We claim to be stymied by 230 enemy combatants at Gitmo. "Oh what shall we do?" we wail. These "are the worst of the worst," we assert without having tried them. "What," we wonder, "shall we do if we release them? Might they come back to haunt us or even kill us?" The answer is, Yes, they might. So we sit paralyzed. We can't try them because we either lack proof or got proof through torture. We can't send some of them to their birthplaces because they might be tortured. (No, I don't understand either.) We can't put them in our jails because they might corrupt our own gentle homegrown killers, rapists and terrorists. Huh?

This is not a serious problem in terms of our safety or security. If tiny Israel can release proven terrorists by the thousands, are we really going to be thrown by 230 sent back to the Middle East Afghanistan and Pakistan?

Yes, one or two might make their way back in our direction. But it is not very likely. Yes, some, or even many, might rejoin the fight against us. But they would be joining millions who already hate us and hundreds of thousands who are already committed to doing us harm. Our prisoners--or detainees--in Gitmo are a statistically insignificant threat to us.

So why are we tied up in knots over them? It is very simple. This is political cowardice. The detainees at Gitmo can legitimately be called the "Bani-Horton." They are truly the "Children of Willie Horton," the paroled killer in Massachusetts, who killed again while on parole and was used to sink the candidacy of Michael Dukakis.
Republicans fear those who were released under Bush and are trying to put responsibility for any other released detainees' bad acts on the Democrats. Both parties live in terror that one Gitmo alumnus will become not the Willie Horton of propagandistic fear, but a real killer who perpetrates a dramatic act of violence against America or American interests. The odds are against it, but there is that chance. So rather than make us safer by closing Gitmo, the politicians chose to make our nation less safe while protecting themselves. Nice.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.org

The painful truth in former Vice President Dick Cheney's spat with President Obama is that there are still far too many places where Obama's policy resembles Bush policy on the terrorism war. In the waning days of his last term Bush scrapped some of the worst of the legally and morally obscene interrogation tactics. He partially emptied the bulging cells of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay. He even tried to do a half hearted kiss and make up with European allies who vehemently opposed US torture tactics. The courts ruled that the Bush administration grossly violated constitutional and legal precepts by scooping up and holding terror suspects with no or flimsy charges and no trials.
The Bush shifts and changes dovetail with Obama's position on the most blatant abuses. But Obama hasn't yet gone much further than that. During the presidential campaign he strongly hinted that he'd dump most if not all of Bush's executive orders that infringed on civil liberties rights and protections in the war on terror and the Iraq war. There were 31 in all.
The best known and most controversial was the executive order that granted wide latitude in loosely defining what and who is a "terrorist combatant," where and how long that individual could be held (indefinitely) and how they should be legally disposed of (none of the standard constitutional protections).

Bush didn't stop there. He issued Executive Order 13440 in July 2007. The order was deliberately vague and did not spell out what interrogation practices were permissible. The order gave the green light to interrogators to dodge the safeguards spelled out in the Geneva Convention against illegal and inhumane treatment of prisoners. The military took the cue and didn't miss a beat in their prisoner interrogations. That was only the most naked example of using an executive order to subvert the law. More than two dozen other executive orders that Bush signed into law and that quickly became operational between 2005 and early 2008 slipped far under the public radar scope and got little if any public attention but were just as abusive.

Bush signed another executive order the same week he signed the executive order that subverted the Supreme Court's ruling against him on prisoner interrogation practices. That order blocked the sale and transfer of property of any individual deemed a threat to the stabilization efforts in Iraq. Translated, that meant that anyone who spoke out against the Iraq War could be branded a terrorist and have their property seized. This legally dubious executive order received passing press mention and little lawmaker scrutiny, and as far as is known is still on the books.

It is still subject to individual interpretation of who is a terrorist (suspect) and worse who makes that determination. The courts for sure don't make that determination. The core of the Bush terrorism war is firmly embedded in the executive orders that permit suspects to be held without trial, gives the military the right to determine what interrogation tactics can be used and when, reinforces the paranoid secrecy that encases the military's dealing with terror suspects. The executive orders were clearly designed to keep the victims from having their day in court, and keeping the courts from giving it to them. Under Bush policy, targeted killings of terrorists wherever they were or deemed to be, was sacrosant. Obama has not changed that policy. Nor has he dismantled Bush's patently illegal domestic surveillance policies.

Bush made a deliberate legal mess of the terrorism war, and his executive orders horribly show that. Cheney's media grandstanding ploy to rap Obama and absolve himself and his boss from legal and moral culpability for their abuses won't change that. Obama's arm tussle with Cheney then really serves no purpose, especially since some of Cheney's charges about his embrace of Bush policy on terror war are not that far off the mark.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, "The Hutchinson Report" can be heard on weekly in Los Angeles on Fridays on KTYM Radio 1460 AM and live streamed nationally on ktym.com

Regarding the fuss over whether waterboarding isn't technically torture and whether it provides useful information, a simple rule of thumb seems to be: If Russia or Al Qaeda did it to our troops, would we say that they violated higher principles? Has the debate gotten to that simple crossroads yet?

I've written recently about concerned Pakistanis and Pakistani-Americans who are attempting to reclaim that country's future. One such group of progressives intend to rally at City Hall's South Lawn (200 N. Spring Street) on Saturday, May 30, at noon.

Their stated goals: to stop the Taliban movement in Pakistan; to embrace tolerance and acceptance for all there; to promote education and stability; and to denounce extremism in the name of Islam. You can write to the organizers at PeaceForPakistanRally@gmail.com.

I know there are cynics out there about who doubt that there is much compatibility between Muslims and the West. The quick case I'd make is this:
1. Human beings tend to play identity politics. When things go bad in our lives or our community, we do so with even more enthusiasm (as Eric Hoffer noted, the less we can claim excellence for ourselves, the more we claim ALL excellence for our tribe or religion or sports team. Because of problems in the Middle East and South Asia, we've seen identity politics there shift from love of country, within failing countries, to love of religion (where extremists can at least claim some hope of recreating a golden age that once existed).
2. If the West and the Muslim world were so inherently at odds, why was talk of a civilizational war so muted in the childhood of anyone over the age 30? Presidents from FDR to Reagan to the Bushes eagerly lined up to do business with Muslims in the Middle East, never worrying about incompatibility. The notion of a "civilizational war" is a recent development, a rallying cry for Mideast extremists and American talk-radio hawks who find it to be a wonderful ploy for maximizing their influence.
3. Identity politics depends on region and social conditions. Muslims act differently in Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation, than in Saudi Arabia, or in Orange County.
4. Being cynical about or combative against Islam only feeds into a dangerous polarization of societies. If people in the West condemn Islam as a whole, then progressive Muslims in Pakistan and elsewhere, who are plentiful if a bit quiet, will by the reality of identity politics feel polarized into the very camp that we in the West want them to stay out of. Finger-pointing against poorly understood neighboring religions may make some Westerners feel superior, but it's not good form or good strategy.

I promised to respond to reader Diane's comments here.

The idea of the government "competing" with private business is kind of nonsensical. It's not a "fair fight" so to speak, and utterly pulls the rug out from under the private business owner.

Your example, of higher education, does NOT work quite well at all! (And I hardly think it is the only American asset the rest of the world still envies, but that's another discussion.) First of all, the most elite universities and colleges in this country are private and attended by (basically) only the very wealthy and/or (smaller numbers) the very bright. Damn few public universities/colleges can compete for those most elite students. Those of you who have your shorts tied in a knot about class warfare should not like this system at all. What's more, the government being in the education business "ups" the price for everyone. Your tax dollars subsidizing UCLA means that tuition at USC is going to have to be way higher. I agree that this is a good example, but it's a good example of why government "competition" is a bad idea.

You overstate the demographics of elite schools, But still, those with their "shorts in a knot" are fine with the issue you raise about private school enrollment, because they feel that the great mass of non-wealthy and non-genius students are still getting a chance to go to good colleges, thanks to the taxes that reflect a society's shared commitment.

True free-market people don't seem to fear being "undercut" by the public sector. They like competing with each other and especially with the public sector, since they believe entrepreneurs with a profit motive will always find ways to do things better and cheaper than bloated government bureaucracies who lack a profit motive.

Thus, I'm puzzled by this statement you make: "Your tax dollars subsidizing UCLA means that tuition at USC is going to have to be way higher."

Huh? You're saying that, if a public school uses tax money to keep tuition low enough to allow large numbers of average Joes and Janes to attend, then a private school will have to charge more than it would otherwise...? Wouldn't a private school instead have to be entrepreneurial in providing better service than publics, at the most affordable tuition rate possible?

If there were no publics, and no shared national commitment to higher education, Stanford could easily become a for-profit corporation and bleed the world's wealthiest families to the tune of $200,000 a year, while scholarshipping a few geniuses of lesser means, and letting everyone else go to rot. But if UC Berkeley offers a high-quality, state-supported educational experience without any need to turn a profit, and Cal State Northridge offers an affordable and solid education to tens of thousands, Stanford has to maintain a realistic price in order to keep the right mix of market share. That works for everyone's interests, in education, health, etc. It reflects a great American belief that it's crucial for our nation to keep the market from pricing essential resources out of the reach of the common man.

Life in America isn't about being totally Social Darwinist or totally communist. In America, it's about having a free market with some limited, smart public oversight that reflects collective commitments -- with some of those major commitments being provided directly by Uncle Sam. Even Ronald Reagan believed that. When he said, "Government is the problem," he indicated that it needed to be reformed, not discarded. That's what his progeny don't get.

Finally, for now, one of the reasons that we can't un-do public K-12 education is because they point out, plausibly, that private schools would be quicker to boot out the laggards. Our great nation's promise to provide universal education would fall by the wayside (how do you and our free-marketers here really feel about that promise, by the way....?)

Going back to political trends, I think this is a credible assessment from the liberal Center for American Progress -- and it addresses long-term issues that aren't being addressed or even acknowledged by American conservatives.

Today, more than two-thirds of Americans rate a "progressive" approach to politics favorably, a 25-point increase in favorability over the last five years, with gains coming primarily from those who were previously unaware of the term. "Progressive" now equals "conservative" in terms of overall public favorability (67 percent, respectively). The continuing strength of the conservative brand--if not all of its constitutive ideas--reflects the long-term success of the conservative movement over decades. Despite electoral setbacks and larger proportions of Americans now adhering to progressive ideas about governance and society, the conservative worldview remains appealing to many Americans and creates important cleavages in the electorate, particularly on key cultural and national security beliefs....

But unless and until conservatives recognize the depth of affinity between President Obama's ideological approach and that of the American electorate, conservative ideas likely will remain in secondary status... Notably, the ideological areas of greatest consensus among Americans are all key priorities and investment targets of President Obama: renewable energy; education, science, and infrastructure; universal health care; financial support for the least well-off; public interest regulations; and reductions in inequality financed by increased taxes on the wealthy...

[P]rogressive attitudes about government and economics are particularly strong among those under the age of 30, suggesting the potential for further strengthening of progressivism within the electorate.

I know it may be hard for some of you to buy that Americans worry about the poor or about income inequality, but you again have to go back to the polling that shows that even the majority of America's wealthy are willing to pay higher taxes in order to address the issues mentioned above.

And this piece above doesn't even give much attention to an emerging culture of environmental stewardship among the millennials, which is boring or anathema to today's conservatives and libertarians. Again, these kids may change drastically in ten years, but given the shake-up of the economy and their short-term prospects, they may go on to create a radically different culture than that of their more conservative parents.

Let's talk about this.

1. Why is every group but one moving away from the GOP?
2. Why are even the upper-middle class and wealthy moving away?
3. How temporary is this? Is it no big deal, or is it potentially a big deal?

In the ongoing travails of a recovering libertarian, I'm, uh, digesting some analyses of how the food industry quite intentionally drums up profits by feeding you the seeds of your own destruction. There's this piece in BusinessWeek, for starters, then this entree stuffed with MSG.

A pure free-market person would say that private industry should be free to find whatever way they can to kill you, and that a free press should be equally free to expose them, and that an informed citizenry should vote with their dollars.

I've believed that in the past. But I wonder if it's not a bit too pollyannaish about cynical corporate managers.

I don't much like the idea of over-regulation either. But I do increasingly like the idea of some public vs. private competition. Public institutions are more necessarily bound by the public interest, after all. Though free-marketeers despise the notion of public-sector competition within the healthcare marketplace, I think it's a boon to have someone competing who isn't willing to cut every last corner en route to a profit. That keeps the private sector more honest. The public-private competition works quite well in higher education, which is famous as being the last American asset that the rest of the world still envies.

The operative words in love and war are whatever works. Clearly, Ann Njogu didn't have to read Aristophanes to figure that out. Despite the bad jokes, sniggers, and guffaws about Njogu's seven day sex starvation diet she imposed on Kenyan men to get the country's pig headed, feuding, estranged violence prone Kenyan leaders to the bargaining table, there's some evidence that her ploy worked.

The two leaders met, and presumably made some attempt to hash out their differences. Better to sit across from a negotiating table and eyeball each other, than to egg on goon squads in the streets to maim, rape and kill innocents for God knows what. Another piece of evidence that Njogu touched more than a symbolic nerve, with her sex starvation diet was the lawsuit by James Kimono. He claims that he suffered a mini-phone book list of mental and physical ills during the week his lady just said no to him.
A defiant Njogu in her best George Bush imitation said to bring him on, that she wanted to see the face of a guy who couldn't give up sex for a week for the sake of his country. A final piece of evidence of success, the Kenyan leaders agreed to meet with the nation's women activists. Sorry Kimono, this Lysistrata got her way.

Did guys really stay home from the war just for Joan Baez? I'm aware of the old Aristophanes play and am amused to see it playing out out, as it were.

Will such a strike be effective? I don't think it will make much difference over the long haul. But evolutionary psychologists seem to tie much of human behavior to sexual selection -- in this case, males subconsciously believe that fighting battles and accumulating power will impress women and increase their chances of passing on their genes. (This serves as a motivator even once they're married or old.) You could argue that everything men do is an effort to attract women.

If women begin to indicate that they're not impressed by boys behaving badly, guys may need to rethink their strategy. But human behavior seems to involve a basic tribalism in which men and women both tend to feel threatened by rival tribes and parties; and for that reason, I'm going to guess that the strikes of 2009 will soon be forgotten.

Everything old is new again. Some women in Kenya are going on a one-week sex strike--withholding sex from their husbands or boyfriends as a means of making them stop their violent male behavior. The idea of using sex to motivate men is not new.

In Aristophanes' ancient Greek comedy, Lysistrata, the Trojan women attempt to tame their men by such a work action. Or, I guess, by giving them no action. In the 1960s there was a poster with Joan Baez in a seductive pose and the line, "Girls say 'Yes' to boys who say 'No.'" The clear meaning of which was that boys would be rewarded sexually for avoiding the draft. Presumably the opposite was also true, "Girls would say 'No' to boys who said 'Yes.''

This open use of sex as reward or punishment was later renounced by Joan and other feminists who didn't want to be as open in manipulating their men as a strike implied. Yet, in the real world women do civilize men and make us behave better than our boy testosterone-driven instincts urge. We do "act" civilized and wash, dress, open doors and try to be (or pretend to be) what our women want. You want Alan Alda? I can do that. You prefer Clint Eastwood? Okay on that too. Whatever we call, we all do it--men, women, gay and straight.

But does it work? Not so far. But the experiment has only been going on 2,300 years.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.org

People, my questions of the day are these: Did someone drop Mary Jane Stevenson on her head when she was a baby? Was she deprived of oxygen at birth? What's up with her? The Topanga resident and director of OOA, officially known of as "Obama Organizing for America," herein after referred to "Obvious Oxygen Attrition" is planning a grassroots campaign to push spendthrift President's fiscal agenda ahead.

Some of his spending plans, like healthcare reform, are good. But others like supporting ACORN are lousy and should be nixed as of this writing. Click here now. Help save America. Win valuable prizes on your taxes.

http://stopacorn.gop.com/

It's no secret that traditional diplomacy often falls short. Nations break treaties, shuttle diplomacy often falls by the wayside and everyone goes back to fighting. But all that may change with the brainchild of Kenyan lawyer, Patricia Nyaundi. Modeling her premise after the 2,000 year-old smash hit Lysistrata by Aristophanes, Nyaundi proposed that Kenyan women boycott sex with their husbands for seven days to protest the political unrest in that country.

In the end, it helped bring the nation's opposing forces back together. Kenyan citizen James Kimodo, however, claimed the ban caused stress, mental anguish, backaches and sleepless nights and sued the women's organization for spearheading the movement.

Imagine what a stellar world this would be if nations used this tact instead of trotting out diplomats with Blackberries and three-piece suits. Yes, there would be lots of frayed nerves, bloodshot eyes and headaches in the time being, but there would also be less fighting and fewer wars in the end, so it the ends would justify the means.

As an added bonus, sociologists could also chart the birth rates in nations participating in the ban. This would work well in a country like Finland, which has one of the lowest birth rates on the planet, if they ever started fighting anyone.

...between conservative media and liberal media is that the latter are far more likely to eat their own. See here, as Jon Stewart skewers Nancy Pelosi. I think it's part of the liberal temperament -- more given to wanting to fix things, they take public disagreements and dirty laundry as a natural part of life. Conservatives don't talk about certain kinds of unpleasantness in mixed company, and they get angrier when someone on their side is discussed in a negative light.

That's one reason why liberals are always surprised by charges of unfair media bias: "But we tend to make everyone's life hell!" I'm sure Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Nancy Pelosi, and someday even Barack Obama will agree.

An example of the latest social consciousness is the wine tasting phenomena. Each time I get an internet invite for one of those things, I think, "Who cares?" meaning who cares how twenty alcoholic drinks lined up in a row really taste? The attendees at one of those bashes are going to be too drunk to remember how anything tasted anyhow. Sometimes I think it is an old slipperoo back to the Romans and gladiator times.

This was my first op-ed in the Daily News, and only my second column ever. How did the guy who wrote this go on to write the stuff that you see on this site this week? Before I answer, I'll see if you can guess.

Holy cow, the unaccomplished Robert Gates made this list of best leaders.

The reflexive Obama bashers on this site will say that the MSM only listed him in order to inflate Obama's phony rep for bipartisanship. When they're reminded that this list was made before Obama picked Gates to stay on, they'll just go back to threatening to stay at home if taxes are raised on people who are much richer than they.

Donald Trump did the right, no the only thing, that he could do when he cast his one man vote not to snatch Carrie Prejean's Miss California crown. As this writer has repeatedly argued, he looked at the contract she signed and found she did not violate it. He looked at the semi-nude photos and found they were not objectionable.

Most importantly he looked at her answer to the put up question about marriage between a man and a woman and found she had a right to answer the way she did. It had nothing to do with whether one agreed with her answer or not. She had a right to give it and no power on Earth had the right to tell her she couldn't.

He reminded the Prejean loathers who developed an ossified case of hysterical political correctness that opinions that they regard as noxious, odious, and toxic are not prosecutable offenses.

The only thing I fault Trump for is not saying one more thing to the obsessive Prejean bash crowd, and that's now move on.

Someone recently observed in this little cybercommunity that "those of us who have embraced God have gone further in our journey" than those of us who do not embrace a traditional religion. I presume they feel this way because they came to the "right" answer.

Given how many times I've embraced God, then embraced something else and then embraced God again over the decades, I feel a bit excluded here: I personally think you can't go any further in your journey than to have embraced various God traditions and also have embraced the alternatives. I give less credit to those who have had doubts about their faith and then silenced those doubts without first trying a different faith.

Embracing God may seem to be a private matter, one that my family often tells me to shut up about, because they disagree with me about many particulars. But I want to ask a few questions about it, which will hopefully show how keeping it "private" is futile.

* If prayer is a good thing to have in school and if God is such a force for the good, as religious people claim, why not go farther still? How about making comparative religion mandatory in public schools? Shouldn't we use schools to examine the full historical and cultural development of each major faith, comparing and contrasting their claims to available evidence?

* How about going even a step further? How about encouraging schoolchildren to try on a new religion each year? By the time they get a high-school diploma, they'll be able to make choices of faith that will be informed by experience and by facts. To make David L. happy, we can even toss in a year or two of atheism.

* When we quote Gallup polls that show almost all Americans believe in God, are religious people bothered by the fact that a good portion of Americans embrace only the loosest version of God, which would be something like Einstein's pantheistic God? Such a God is synonymous with Mother Nature. Richard Dawkins says that's de facto atheism, since it involves no belief in the miracles of traditional religions. What do religious people here say, though? Einstein and others did seem to find such a "God = Love = Mother Nature = The Universe" concept to provide a sense of meaning and wonder that transcends pure atheism. Incidentally, this may be the camp I'm in. So do I "embrace" God? And is this approach sufficient for you? Would you feel that religion is getting its due in the public sphere if we publicly promoted a pantheistic approach as a consensus foundation for social/moral discourse?

Although they say that religion is a good thing, such true believers tend to have very specific demands regarding how it's discussed and taught publicly. And that has to do specifically with whether they think their religion is in a place to dominate the public debate. If they think their religion can dominate, the true believers will favor prayer and creationism in schools. If they think it can't, they will play a delicate balancing act -- wanting the full right to express their faith while wanting no one to get in their face -- or especially in the faces of their impressionable children -- with rival ideas.

And that's why religion is usually a public matter -- and will usually be a mess, especially in our pluralistic day.

Finally, for Jonathan and Diane, here's a related link, to prove that I don't always speak against religion. What I do tend to speak against, though, is chauvinism, of either the religious or political variety. That chauvinism is what I believe poses the greatest threat to our collective existence -- and while I agree with JD that it can wear many uniforms, it never cleans up so well as when it dons clerical garments. ("I like the hats," as George Costanza once said of a prospective religion...)

The issue for the umpteenth time is and never has been about whether Carrie Prejean violated the dumb, probably legally challengeable, and possibly legally winnable Miss California contract she signed. The two supposedly most glaring offending sections of the contract that Prejean allegedly sloughed off state that a Miss winner can't appear in a lewd, compromising, and sexually suggestive manner and that the pageant has exclusive right and control over all Miss's personal appearances.

The first clause is laughable. Compare the picture of Prejean in the skimpy bikini that she pranced around the stage in and the supposedly illicit picture, a picture which by the way that was taken ages before she or the pageant ever heard of each other, that rocketed around the internet of her in her pink drawers. Then decide which is the most lewd, compromising and sexually suggestive.

The second clause that gives the pageant the right to control any and all of her personal actions is dubious. The compelling words in the clause are "to me." The clause is there to make sure that Miss California doesn't rake in any cash or engage in any commercial promotional ventures or talent appearances that don't line the pockets of the pageant organizers. Plugging a message for a religious group hardly fits that bill. A message in which she expressed a belief that the world has heard and every one else has by now heard. The contract, though, gave the pageant wheels just enough of a legal cover they hunger for to dump her.

None of this changes the hard fact that the effort to boot her is about a beauty pageant winner who was asked about and then dared to speak her mind on one of the most polarizing, and divisive issues of the day, namely marriage between a man and a woman. The question smacked of being a set-up question if there ever was one. The political thought police earmarked for excision before the last of those ill fated words fell from her lips in response. The Prejean saga is also about a beauty pageant winner who innocently and inadvertently exposed the silly and hypocritical charade that beauty pageant sponsors delight in pawning off and that's that brains and talent trump a pretty face and bod.

Prejean's honesty in stating her marriage beliefs violate the most sacred canon of politically correct policing, and that is that anything that an advocacy group deems that smacks of their interpretation of bigotry must be swiftly and harshly banned in Boston. There is no room for debate or discussion. To defend Prejean against this view has absolutely nothing to do with agreement or disagreement with her views. This writer has written a Mt. Everest stack of articles, commentaries, and backed countless protest actions opposing Prejean's narrow view of marriage and gay rights.

But the fight against her views has never been waged by mounting a systematic and relentless hit below the belt, ad hominen, sneaky, back door campaign of character assassination, mud slinging, and lies. A campaign against her that even included a dim witted, juvenile delinquent effort at a Freudian analysis of the bedroom battles of the woman's divorced parents to explain her.

With or without her beauty crown, Prejean is an ad person's and a religious fundamentalist dream, in fact several dreams. She's young, photogenic, gutsy, and articulate. She can be spun as the imperfect soul who found redemption through a cause she believed in even when it meant kissing off the vapid glitter, glamour, and fortune of the beauty celebrity life.

To her backers, Prejean stands as the beauty queen who is more than just another pretty grinning face, sex commodity. She stands tall as the beauty queen who refused to be hacked up on the altar of political correctness. That's the Miss California that the beauty pageant and the hate on Prejean crowd unwittingly created.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, "The Hutchinson Report" can be heard on weekly in Los Angeles at 9:30 AM PST on KTYM Radio 1460 AM and nationally on blogtalkradio.com

Earl has argued in the past that the White House has been in error, strategically, in framing itself as being in a battle against Rush Limbaugh, as Earl feels this has been boosting Limbaugh's standing and ratings.

But I think Dick Cheney's public support of Limbaugh and castigation of moderates like Colin Powell, noted here, is exactly why the White House is delighted by the "us against Rush" approach. The GOP will win national elections when they include people who aren't just ardently pro-life and pro-torture and anti-progressive, and Colin Powell is one of the few people who can model the kind of big tent that the GOP needs. So Cheney is now as happilly hapless an aide to the White House as Rush has been.

Democrats' strategy may to be to draw conservative zealots to the precipice and dare them to take flight; and once they've fallen, Dems will then have a greater chance to work with the moderates. The strategy does have risks, though.

The first page of the Constitution of the nation's oldest, most venerable and respected civil right's organization boldly states that it will wage a relentless fight to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of all citizens. During much of its century of existence, the NAACP has proudly and unambiguously done just that. It waged breath taking battles against economic and housing discrimination, racial slurs and defamation, and against poverty.

Now we come to Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald T. Sterling; or rather Donald T. Sterling and the NAACP's cornerstone issues of economic and housing discrimination, racial slurs and defamation, and poverty. The much maligned Sterling has been sued, verbally lambasted, reprimanded, hit with reams of bad press, and threatened with pickets for these racial wrongs. Yet, the Los Angeles NAACP Chapter will give Sterling its highest honor, a lifetime achievement award. The shame, absurdity, and contradiction of the award to a man who in word, deed, and symbol is the diametric opposite of everything the nation's premier civil rights group stands for and has fought for is enough to draw a gag.

A Google search with the name Donald Sterling and racial discrimination found nearly 12,000 results. Not one of them even remotely had Sterling doing anything to further racial goodwill. The checklist of reported Sterling racial escapades include a Justice Department housing discrimination lawsuit and forced settlement, slurs and gaffes against Hispanics and African-Americans, and that includes two high profile Clipper players, the shooing of minorities away from his pricey Beverly Hills condos and rentals, and an overblown and failed promise to build a Homeless shelter on L.A.s skid row. Then there's the allegations and lawsuit by former Clipper General Manager Elgin Baylor that Sterling runs his operations like a Southern plantation.

The NAACP airbrushed this away and simply said that Sterling has been a gem in giving oodles of tickets away to needy inner city kids and ladling out some cash to charities and sports camps for them. How any of this ranks as a take the lead, storm the barriers battle against racial injustice is a mystery. Dozens of sporting organizations, corporations, and high profile athletes routinely shove cash out to sports camps, and charities, and do ticket giveaways mostly to image massage, as tax write offs, or a PR, press or goodwill gesture.

The issue is not what, whether or even if Sterling did anything to further the cause of racial justice and civil rights. He hasn't. The issue is what the NAACP is doing to further it. NAACP President Benjamin T. Jealous to his credit has tried to define and carve out a new, even more aggressive role for the organization in that battle. He had too. In years past, the knock against the nation's oldest civil rights organization was that it was too staid, and tradition bound. That the NAACP's embrace of showy, symbolic fights did little to solve the mountainous problems of drugs, crime, and gangs, soaring joblessness among young blacks, and the astronomical rate of prison incarceration of blacks. And that it had badly slipped in fighting its trademark fights against job, and housing discrimination, the gaping racial disparities in education, and for criminal justice reforms.

The oft heard criticism that the NAACP retreated from visible activism on thorny racial and economic problems can be directly traced to the fight against legal segregation in the 1960s, the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., the class divisions within black America, and the greening of the black middle-class. By the close of the 1960s the civil rights movement had spent itself. The torrent of demonstrations, sit-ins, marches and civil rights legislation annihilated the legal wall of segregation. With the barriers erased, the black middle-class grew by leaps and bounds.

These battles did not have the remotest bearing on the lives of the black poor. A tilt by them toward a hard-edged activist agenda ran the risk of alienating the corporate donors and the Democratic politicians that the NAACP leaders have carefully cultivated. They depend on them to gain even more jobs, promotions, and contracts for black professionals and businesspeople, to bag contributions for their fundraising campaigns, dinners, banquets, scholarship funds and programs and increased political patronage.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that, money is the life blood of any organization, even an activist organization. But it's wrong if the organization pursues cash from any and every source with little regard to the damage the benefactor does or may do to the fight for civil rights and racial justice.

The same rule applies when it comes to who and for what a civil rights organization gives awards, let alone its most prestigious award. The award must go for real achievement and belief in the fight for civil rights and racial justice. If not then it's just a tainted and cheap piece of paper or slab of glass handed out to anyone with a name, fat checkbook, grants political favors, or who's adept at media grabbing PR gestures.

The NAACP should hold off on its lifetime achievement award to Sterling. He still has much to do to show he really deserves one.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, "The Hutchinson Report" can be heard on weekly in Los Angeles at 9:30 AM PST on KTYM Radio 1460 AM and nationally on blogtalkradio.com

Cleveland Indian fans have an answer for their anemic performing team. They want the players to do a Manny Ramirez and clog their veins with roids. Maybe that might be good for a couple of extra shots toward the parking lot every game. The killing thing about this is the fans who demanded the Manny roids weren't horsing around. If cheating can win a few more games why the heck not, after all, so the thinking goes some of the games heaviest hitters on some of the game's winningest teams have loaded up on the stuff in the past, present, and probably in the future too. And may still get away with it again.
This was glaringly and embarrassingly clear in 2007 when the long awaited and much ballyhooed Mitchell Report hit the news. The report drove home a few disturbing truths about the game and much of sport.

The first was that dozens of players with the wink and nod connivance of the MLB and union top cats, trainers, medical personnel, drug companies, and even federal watchdog agencies winked and nodded as some of baseballs biggest names doped themselves into prodigious feats on the diamond
Another more disturbing truth is that the dump for the deliberate blind eye to drug abuse crashed down on the head of one man, Barry Bonds. Bonds was not indicted by a federal grand jury for steroid use, the charge was lying to a grand jury, the real reason he may eventually wind up in the docket is that he was the most visible, high profile, and thus convenient scapegoat to take the blame for baseball's revel in its steroid filled home run bleacher shots that sent attendance records soaring and jingled cash registers. Roger Clemons is also on the roid hot seat but so far he's been able to duck, dodge,deflect and keep the legal heat off him.

Baseball didn't say zilch about banning the use of steroids before 2002. It had absolutely zero testing procedures that mandated penalties for those caught cheating until 2004. It did not scrub the use of the performance drug HGH until 2005. Even then, punishments were spotty, and capricious. That is until the feds began to take a harder look at the use of the junk in the sport, and Bonds began to inch closer to MLB icons Babe Ruth's former home run record and later Hank Aaron's home run record.

One other bitter truth is that no matter how many roid abusers were and are named and no matter how many pious squawks are heard about sullying the game and no matter how many recommendations to purge the offenders from the game are made, other than Bonds no other MLB baseball player has yet or even likely will wind up in a court docket for illicit use of steroids. Despite the hoopla, teeth gnashing, phony self-righteous indignation, and clamor to do something about the shame and disgrace of drug use in the majors, there's absolutely no guarantee that the MLB officials or owners will follow to the strict letter the reform proposals made. Handslap suspensions, reprimands, fines, and a spate of bad publicity will be the order of the day in the game for the Mannys and Alexs.

Here's the prediction. Manny grabbed the headlines for a day. It set the chops of talking head sports commentators, sports writers, and baseball buffs in motion. It sparked another round of angry calls from some public officials to crack down on drug use in the majors. It drew solemn pledges from MLB officials to do whatever it takes to end the cheating. And just as quickly the Manny flap will blow over.

Meanwhile Bonds who's out of baseball and has absolutely no market value to the sport will still stand as the favorite punching bag for the owners, the fans, and sportswriters. He'll be the fount of evil for everything wrong with the game. A Bonds conviction will be even better. This will give MLB officials the perfect chance to distance themselves from the cheaters, or more accurately, the perceived grand symbol of drug cheating, Bonds.
Manny won't have to worry about any of that. He'll be back in the Dodger's line-up in July and Mannywood will be built higher than ever. And Indian fans will scream even louder, Bring on the roids!

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, "The Hutchinson Report" can be heard on weekly in Los Angeles on KTYM Radio 1460 AM and nationally on blogtalkradio.com

We've been mauling each other this week over whether religion makes a better world or a worse one, or if human nature would make a mess of things whether or not we clothed it in religion, politics, or school rivalries.

I'm off to a couple of work events and Mother's day festivities that will keep me offline for most of the next few days, but I want to touch on some of Diane's concerns with my own arguments. She has said that I set up strawman arguments and I believe that she thinks my arguments are overgeneralized and overstated.

The irony is that, five or ten years ago, Diane and I would have been on the same page and on the same side. I too derided atheists and secularists like David and like "Ditchkins." I detested how they overgeneralized and exaggerated the crimes of an ignorant few and pinned them on the rest of us. I stayed up late brooding over their meanness. I ridiculed their ability to believe that the cosmos didn't require my concept of divine intervention.

For myself, my own anxious position could have been described by words from Eric Hoffer: "Vehemence is the expression of a blind effort to support and uphold something that can never stand on its own...Whether it our own meaningless self we are upholding, or some doctrine devoid of evidence, we can do it only in a frenzy of faith."

Eventually, the frenzy wore me out. I'm sorry. I went from trying to get critics of my faith to understand the nuances that separated me from "those who get it wrong" to not worrying so much about nuances between different stripes of believers.

If you press me on the subject, you'll find that I have little quibble with the gracious and ecumenical style of Jonathan D, who is more eager to learn from other traditions than he is to suggest that the world will bloom if only it adopted his own tradition or tried "the personal relationship with the divine" that he favors. Jonathan's is the style of Mother Teresa, Henri Nouwen, the Muslim Sufis, and so on. But I think Sam Harris raises good points when he says that their style often provides too much intellectual and moral cover for the fanatics within their traditions.

Like Diane, I spent many years doing the math in a way that always had the balance of good within the column of my religion, and the balance of bad in the other religions. When someone proved my figures wrong, I dismissed the entire thing by saying that all human beings are bad at math, but at least my religion believed in a God who was the perfect mathematician, which others would see if they just adopted my faith. That made me a very slippery fish to catch.

Eventually, I felt crushed by the piles of empirical data and life experiences that left me unable to claim the superiority of my way. That may not be important to Jonathan in the first place, but it was important to me, which is why I then walked away entirely, rather than simply watering down my own proselytizing beliefs.

I soon found myself rather enjoying how the Dawkinses and Hitchinses of the world tied up evangelical people in knots; if nothing else, it seemed to slow down how arrogantly we hardcore folks would crash about in the world. It showed how laughable it was for we proselytizers to first demand a chance to assert the superiority of our beliefs, and then claim, as we struggled to assert our superiority, that others should at least leave us alone and respect our beliefs. We had been pressing our advantage whenever we felt we could win the day, and we would demand minority rights if we felt others might win the day. I got tired of it, and I got tired of our talk about how other traditions were evil, when I knew that they were no more evil than the ones that I'd followed. I apologize, Diane, if I walked away from it all because I just didn't "do it right" or had too little faith. But more later.

The planet is divided into two kinds of people - those that think they're going to get caught for their dastardly deeds and those that don't. I'm in one camp; Manny Ramirez is in the other. The thing about the latter group is that you can call them, issue warnings, send emails and telegrams, yet they will go on their merry way and step in every foxhole they have dug for themselves. And so it was with Manny Ramirez.

If I were a major league baseball player or any other sports figure, then I would have had the following conversation with my doctor:

Doc: I'm going to prescribe some HCG pills for you. Take one in the morning and two at night.

Manny: Are there any side effects?

Doc: Let's just say that your uniform may fit tighter and you may develop some growth spurts, but other than that, no.

End of conversation. Ramirez claims that he didn't know what was in those funny little pills, though he knew the rules of the game and he knew the consequences, but he got too pumped up, so he thought the rules didn't apply to him, but they did, which they well should have.

Jonathan, I believe your comment about the uniforms and dye is well-placed, in your response to my previous post. I think you're completely right, if religion disappeared, we would find other reasons to kill each other, Americans vs. Canadians, Trojans vs. Bruins, etc. That's in our tribal nature, which, um, evolution seems to predict and describe better than theology does.

I think the hard part is that, while I'm having a lovely interchange with you, I find myself struggling with Diane's efforts to 1) minimize how much the FrontPage magazine crowd wants to bomb Muslim lands, and 2) pointing out how war-loving those Muslims are.

Where Diane does not see a "current" Christian-Jew war underway, I think it's only because the 2,000 year history of anti-Semitism has given way in our times to new demons such as gay marriage or Muslims, along with a desire to see Jesus return soon to a Netanyahu-governed Jerusalem.

So again, Jonathan, I agree about the uniforms. But I'm not sure most religious people would agree that the "central message" being about kindness to one another and about a sense of wonder. Many would say it's about being moral, obeying rules, being tested, fighting for rights, etc. I doubt Diane would agree with you. And then at some point, the fights inevitably become foreign policy disputes, and none are more zealously fought than those that are called for by the gods. You gotta give me that, right?

I've had the privilege of lunching with the good Professor D, and I can tell you that I could sit at his feet all day and learn great new insights from him about life, about Judaism, about Islam and about Christianity.

So I want to nudge him gently on what he means by this, from his most recent post:

Why do we assume when we say God that we mean the same thing, and that it refers to a specific religion and theology? Operationally, of course, it doesn't.... Do I experience the divine? Absolutely. Is mine bigger and better and more real than yours? That is a non-sense question. We do not capture the infinite in the net of our words. Poets come closer than theologians.

In the end, I suspect the average Joe cares about neither the theologians nor the poets. (I say that as a former amateur theologian who spent long hours in the Fuller library boning up on every possible theological angle that I could teach to religious groups). But Joe happily signs up to fight anyway, over the course of history and to this day, usually on the basis of religion -- e.g., the group that is statistically most likely, within America, to believe that we must bomb and/or invade Muslim nations happen to be, you guessed it, evangelical Christians. If compelled to argue against such an approach, Diane or others may argue that these people are simply lapsing from a "true relationship" with God.

And that gets society back where we started -- getting warlike angry over even the tiny particulars of faith. Not everyone has the same view of God, and Buddhists and Hindus can be all over the map. But we have problems even when there is some agreement (maybe especially where there is some agreement). Muslims and Christians and Jews and Western monotheists generally look to the same God, but they quibble about what he/She is like and what a relationship with Her involves. That causes incredible consternation, along with wars, even today.

My question is, Who referees all this? Who referees the disputes, within one religion and across religions? "Ditchkins" argue against the whole enterprise, because they feel that it's impossible to police. And they cite moderates as being chickens who rationalize the excesses of the mob.

Jonathan, is it enough to say that the poets are right...? The poets police nothing and they seem to guide no one.

A rabbi friend of mine was challenged by a humanist to defend God against the charges of being a primitive superstition. His response was great. He said, "I probably don't believe in the same God you don't believe in."

Why do we assume when we say God that we mean the same thing, and that it refers to a specific religion and theology? Operationally, of course, it doesn't. Yet the pro God people and the anti God people all seem to act as if we were arguing about the same God, the same theology. The question I get most often when teaching comparative religion is this: Do Jews and Christians and Muslims believe in the same God?" The answer is: Depends.

Etymologically, the Hebrew Eloheem, (a plural noun) in its singular form Eloah, is related to the Arabic Allah. The Christian God Deus was shortened from Deus Pater (God the Father), which derived from Zeus Pitar (with Jupiter a linguistic cousin). So, do Christians believe in Zeus? Not theologically, but linguistically--and, I'd argue that the picture we have in our heads, no matter how sophisticated we are, is of Zeus. Say God and see an old white man on golden throne wearing a toga. Hard to get rid of that picture. It, as Wittgenstein referred to Platonic Idealism, is a picture that has held us captive for 2,000 years.

Interestingly, Judaism does not, for the most part, do theology. Relating to or with the divine is not an "ology." In fact, there is no native Hebrew word for theology. We have to borrow the Greek. I suspect this is because Judaism is not based so much on faith (belief) but in faithfulness to a relationship. God is not apprehended rationally or intellectually but encountered in life, in love and in nature. God is summoned by good deeds and not belief, opinion or logic.

Strangely, people often challenge me about my beliefs about God, but no one ever asks if I believe in Love. They know that love is not about belief but experience. It is not a measurable ology but an experience. Do I experience the divine? Absolutely. Is mine bigger and better and more real than yours? That is a non-sense question. We do not capture the infinite in the net of our words. Poets come closer than theologians.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.org

For those of you engaged in this discussion of religion within society (which I know involves at least Diane and David, I would love to hear feedback on this piece by that "pinko" David Brooks.

Beauty pageants should be an anachronism in 2009. These are young women who have yet to complete their education and professional training or to fully define themselves as human beings, yet they're being "judged" for their, um, talents. Miss City of Orange is a 19-year-old at Chapman University. Miss Huntington Beach is 18 but still in high school, and Miss San Bernardino is a 17-year-old high schooler, which sends a funny mixed message to middle-aged men ogling the TV set.

Such contests are all about the human quest for beauty, and yet we've never been able to take that at face value, so we ask them silly questions and nod, "uh-huh," as if to pretend we're interested in her personality, and then occasionally get offended. The Carrie Prejean saga shows that we're puzzled, just stumped, by gender and orientation roles in our day. As smart as we are, our scientists, humanists, theologians, philosophers and laity have no slightest consensus on how to view gender, marriage or any aspect of human behavior. That should make us all a little humble, shouldn't it?

Miss California nee Carrie Prejean is right to scream foul at the scalp hunters who want hers after the pictures of her clad in revealing pink drawers with her back turned to the camera in a suggestive pose ripped around websites. The real issue is still that Prejean opened her yap and told beauty contest judge Perez Hilton what she honestly thought about gays and her rock solid devotion to her Lord and savior Jesus Christ. Since then Prejean has been the target of a protracted, noisy, and vicious campaign to tar and smear her.

Prejean answered a question that probably shouldn't have been asked. She answered it honestly, and she answered it after she pranced round nearly nude in a contest that is the ultimate in hype, hypocrisy, and female commodization. So whether she pranced around for racy photo shoots in her pink undies is irrelevant. A beauty contest is to crown a beauty queen not a moral, values, religious or atheist queen.

Prejean should scream, and scream loudly, that she's being slapped in the face with the proverbial double standard that holds that a woman who flaunts her body is somehow less moral, virtuous and fit to win a beauty contest. Or as she put it that openly mocks her Christian faith. If that's hypocrisy, it's hypocrisy she didn't make. May she keep and wear her crown well.

I spent many years being outraged by the claims of atheists while I attempted "veinly" (till the veins burst in my forehead) to explain why faith was superior to atheism even though we people of faith were constantly finding reasons to bomb one another (all in the name of peace, of course; we only bomb villains who don't like peace).

That's why I was intrigued to see Stanley Fish, the humanist who blogs at the New York Times, penning a "God Talk" piece this week that has provoked great discussion. Fish discusses a new book by Terry Eagle, a British critic, who makes the case for religion to the science crowd and the secular left, which he conflates into one entity, just as he conflates loud atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens into one "Ditchkins" entity.

The piece is seen by many people of faith as an encouragement. Me, I find it slightly puzzling. It leaves me cold. Check out the piece, and then meet me here to discuss it.

[Pause... I know, it's a loooong piece.]

Okay, let's get started. Let me begin with the end, with Fish's conclusion:

The book starts out witty and then gets angrier and angrier... Christianity may or may not be the faith he holds to (he doesn't tell us), but he speaks, he says, "partly in defense of my own forbearers, against the charge that the creed to which they dedicated their lives is worthless and void."

The other source of his anger is implied but never quite made explicit. He is angry, I think, at having to expend so much mental and emotional energy refuting the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins. I know just how he feels.

I roll my eyes at Eagle, who defends the faith of his forefathers without actually being able to spell out what he believes. He has faith in faith. But he forgets that arguments over even the nature of the eucharist led to bloodshed in Europe over the centuries.

It's easy to defend faith in the abstract when you're not getting shot in the ass by the Protestants for coming out and standing up for Roman Catholicism. It's easy to say that you stand up for the Judeo-Christian faith in the abstract, forgetting that being Judeo-Christian generally hasn't brought much love among brothers over two millennia.

In that sense, I see Eagle and Fish merely standing up for today's underdog, which happens to be religion in their estimate. Both seem to confess to the, um, "flaws" in religion, but are less bothered by the bloodshed of the millennia than by the impolite words of the schoolyard bully Ditchkins. I suppose their angered exhaustion comes from feeling besieged again on the playground at an age where they should feel safe.

Why does it take so much intellectual and emotional energy to refute these "shallow" bullies? That should be easy for an intellectual. But the issue goes deeper. People of faith, if Fish is right, should have a high-octane fuel in their vehicle that keeps them on cruise control, while the Ditchkins should be a madman stalled at the side of the road who stubbornly refuses to pour fuel into his own tank, or who pours it directly into the engine and watches it explode. A difficult and puzzling life should be unnavigable for Ditchkins but child's play (relatively speaking) for the true believer.

But in practice, Ditchkins is doing just fine, while the believers spend their entire time needing to remind themselves of the efficacy of their unique brand of gasoline. Ditchkins may be a little prickly and contrarian and provocative, but so is Terry Eagle.

As for Fish, he smacks his lips in delight when he recounts how Eagle, in defending religion from the superstition charge, "turns the tables and applies the label of 'superstition' to the idea of progress."

That seems quite clever at first blush. Have we truly progressed? You could certainly argue that we haven't. But it's a pointless exercise in terms of defending God-centered religion.

For one thing, science isn't meant to represent moral progress, it simply is designed to leave old, discredited views behind. Scientists are imperfect but are far more willing to leave behind a bad idea; meanwhile, a theologian such as NT Wright wins great acclaim among "smart" people of faith by mocking science when it's convenient and using reason when it's convenient, all in the name of arguing that Jesus HAD to rise phyically from the dead.

Science cares about what works. Religion cares about what works. The distinctions about how one asks What and one asks Why are illusions. E. O. Wilson, the brilliant biologist, foresees an age of consilience that binds science, art and ethics. Wilson may be too optimistic about science: But he is hardly an angry atheist; he simply is a nice former fundamentalist from Alabama who is intent on finding out what works and in leaving behind what doesn't. Fish and Eagle should take him on, as they would find him a tougher challenge than the Ditchkins bully.

Also: Wat is God, and what favor have Eagle and Fish done for resurrecting his name among their cocktail party crowd? Even the Buddhists don't believe in God. Are Eagle and Fish mocking them for their stubborness too? People in Pakistan are killing one another right now over differences over what it means to worship the one true God. Belief in God is just the beginning of our sorrows -- and given that Eagle takes sides only vaguely, perhaps he realizes that.

I take issue with Fish's contention that "we are where we always were, confronted with a choice between a flawed but aspiring religious faith or a spectacularly hubristic faith in the power of unaided reason and a progress that has no content."

Dr. Fish, "Is that your final answer"? Is that your final set of choices? Take a little time to consider that not all faith is aspiring amidst its flaws -- indeed, much of it is "spectacularly hubristic," in a way that allows leaders to send troops off willingly to die in a way that they would never die for the newest scientific paradigm. And not all science is hubristic; just as religious people of goodwill insist that the content of religion is only held appropriately with humble hands, the content and aims of science -- with its emphasis on intellectual honesty and transparency -- can more easily be held humbly. That may be one reason why Ditchkins is guilty of rudeness at worst. That's not so bad. Let the bullies be.

As for Fish and Eagle, I'd still like to see them take on E. O. Wilson instead, and we can see how the two pseudo-defenders of pseudo-faith come away from the experience.

***

I just found another piece by Fish mocking the scientific crowd a few years ago. Ridiculing the power of science to be objective via falsification, he writes, "Asking that religious faith consider itself falsified by empirical evidence is as foolish as asking that natural selection tremble before the assertion of deity and design. Falsification, if it occurs, always occurs from the inside."

Um. Sorry. Religion and faith involve far more than a vague, unfalsifiable view of invisible deity. They attract followings because of specific doctrines, which in principle ought to be falsifiable. People from NT Wright going back to Paul insist that, if Jesus did not rise bodily, then faith and religion are meaningless and they'll just head to the next whorehouse. Muslims make similar claims about the content of their faith. Such believers go through incredible mental gymnastics to prove that the facts line up in their religions. This is not a recent phenomenon caused by the age of science -- they have always believed their "facts" to be true, and generally in the same sensory way that we do today.

Fish seems to gloss over the fundamental reality of most religion, while seeking to antagonize the Ditchkins crowd.

The moral brigade is out, and they are back in the building. But I am going to have to don a big "so what" to their take on Miss California, AKA Carrie Prejean. First, if a contestant is going to lose the Miss USA crown, then it should be over something important like the talent competition, not over her views on same-sex marriages. After all, Barack Obama and Joe Biden aren't exactly gay marriage activists, either, but I don't think that Perez Hilton, the pageant judge who posed the question, trotted on down to the polls and voted for the opposition over it, either.

But in terms of those photos and the latest question of the week, which is, "Is Miss California a hypocrite and should we banish her to her own desert island?" the answer is unequivocally no. First of all, the pictures circulating on the Internet basically show her back, and backs aren't that scandalous this season. And second of all, she is wearing about the same amount of clothes that actresses wear on the red carpet or that some women wear to the mall.

Should more pictures surface that would make Larry Flynt roll his eyes in ecstasy and salivate, then the lesson is clear: Be careful what you do when you are young, drunk and crazy. It could come back to haunt you. If they are on par with lingerie ads in the (still existent) Sunday papers or a Victoria's Secret fashion show, then I'd like to give the moral police a big whatever and drop them off in an Amish farming community.

Okay, some columns just write themselves, and anything about Miss California, Carrie Prejean, is bound to be titillating. The facts don't need any augmentation. They stand alone and are more than sufficient without inflating the importance of the subject, because the subject has no importance.

Miss California believes she missed being Miss USA on the basis of her response to a "got ya" question on gay marriage. She started being thankful that she lives in a country where "same marriage" is possible, but then admitted she was personally against it. Okay, I'm devastated that arguably the most inarticulate person of external beauty doesn't approve of "same marriage." But why do I care? Why would anyone care what her position is on anything. Though supine might be nice.

She blames the question for costing her first place and claims that she is being persecuted for her Christian beliefs. She wants to be judged on her God-given endowments. But some of her assets were pageant-given. She is also being persecuted for the boob job she got to boost her chances. A representative of our own California pageant admitted to paying for the enhancement of her natural mammaltude. Apparently while steroids are wrong in sports, plastics are okay in beauty pageants. Whom she blames for the naughty photographs she posed for, I really don't know. The devil made her do it.

This is a very minor story of no intrinsic importance, still, it's good to keep abreast of all the news.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.org

Two kinds of Republicans fascinate me right now. The unapologetic activists and the reflective guys. David Brooks is the latter. See here:

Today, if Republicans had learned the right lessons from the Westerns, or at least John Ford Westerns, they would not be the party of untrammeled freedom and maximum individual choice. They would once again be the party of community and civic order.

They would begin every day by reminding themselves of the concrete ways people build orderly neighborhoods, and how those neighborhoods bind a nation. They would ask: What threatens Americans' efforts to build orderly places to raise their kids? ....

The party sometimes seems cut off from the concrete relationships of neighborhood life. Republicans are so much the party of individualism and freedom these days that they are no longer the party of community and order. This puts them out of touch with the young, who are exceptionally community-oriented. It gives them nothing to say to the lower middle class, who fear that capitalism has gone haywire. It gives them little to say to the upper middle class, who are interested in the environment and other common concerns.

The Republicans talk more about the market than about society, more about income than quality of life. They celebrate capitalism, which is a means, and are inarticulate about the good life, which is the end. They take things like tax cuts, which are tactics that are good in some circumstances, and elevate them to holy principle, to be pursued in all circumstances.

It's viral videos like this, that are simply long-play versions of the rhetoric of Fox News' own reporters and various other "mainstream" conservative pundits

Conservatives need an intellectual revival. But the angry appeal of the more radical stuff cited above may linger through at least one more election cycle.

...well, online versions of the dinosaurs. See here. Not much reason to believe that "fair and balanced" outlets have gashed the establishment boys. it goes back to my point that the people who decry an MSM agenda constitute a hyperpartisan minority, not the, um, silent majority of America.

I've long liked Robert Gates, the sort of bipartisan, decent leader that needs to be a model for many others. Nice interview today with Fareed Zakaria, a far-too-rare moment of thoughtful analysis rather than partisan posturing.

I am aware that there are certain trades where people make off with the stash while leaving the rest of us drained and nearly bankrupt. I am talking about doctors, crazy lawyers, mechanics, wacko contractors, plumbers and others whose mercy we are sometimes at.

The other day, the stars must have been aligned correctly when I called Jorge at A&R Plumbing in Van Nuys and asked him to come out and help fix a common kitchen disaster, the broken garbage disposal. This was not our first business meeting, as I had found him on the Better Business Bureau's about a year ago when he installed a handsome kitchen faucet.

Being somewhat of an eco nut, I seldom used that contraption and felt that the malfunction was because of those people I bought this place from, who had not only tried to make off with the gas fire place shortly before escrow closed but had pulled some other fast ones as well.

Having had a good experience with him, I asked for an appointment to fix the appliance but not before he encouraged me to apply my own trade and wiles.

"There's a little button at the bottom," he said. "Press it in to reset it."

I looked under the sink and did likewise. Out of the silence came a melodious hum like a tipsy karaoke singer stuck on a dreadful note.

"Now take out what is trapped in the drain."

"Now I know why you guys make so much money," I said, "but it's still not working."

"You need a wrench. There should be one under your cabinet."

Obviously, he didn't remember being here.

"Maybe one of your neighbors has one."

Scraping that idea, I reached in, turned the blades myself then flipped the switch. And voila, it worked. Which only goes to show that there are honest plumbers who sometimes appear on the Better Business Bureau's website.

Hillary, Hilliary, Hilliary. Aye, what were ye thinking, lass? Do ye, the State Department and Obeema really think that giving the Palestinians a state is going to help bring peace and harmony to the area?

Because if ye do, then I there's a Bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell ye. And remember, they've been offered their own state already and they turned it down, turned it down cold, so it isn't going to work again this time around, either. Besides, what would they possibly do with the land?

...for dismantling capitalism. Not. Read all about it here.

So what's wrong with Buffet? Has he been palling around with Bill Ayers....?

Nice piece here by Peggy Noonan, who seems in recent years to wake up each new morning in agony over her party and her nation:

A great party cannot live by constantly subtracting, by removing or shunning those who are not faithful to every aspect of its beliefs, or who don't accept every pole, or who are just barely fitting under the tent. Room should be made for them....

In the party now there is too much ferocity, and bloody-mindedness. The other day Sen. Jim DeMint said he's rather have 30 good and reliable conservative senators than 60 unreliable Republicans. Really? Good luck stopping an agenda you call socialist with 30 hardy votes....

Republicans are trying to find themselves during a time of dramatic, rolling change, demographic change, younger voters who seem embarrassed to be associated with them, an aging and contracting base and, perhaps most ominously, what appears to be a new national openness to a redefinition of the relationship between the government and the governed.

You know we have sunk into the pigsty of political correctness when we spend time arguing about the name and not handling the problem. But maybe that is the definition of political correctness: distraction from substance.

So what shall we call the flu that may be an epidemic, a pandemic or just endemic? Does the public have any idea of the differences, or are we just throwing words around? What is the relationship between this flu's morbidity (illness) rate and its mortality (death) rate? Again, does the public know the difference and are the media explaining?

Since we were just introduced last week, this flu has gone as viral as the Susan Boyle video from Britain's Got Talent. Only this time it's The World's Got a Problem. We were introduced to it as the Mexican Swine Flu. But we were criticized by Mexico. They apparently felt hurt by the attribution. This is strange since Tequila, which kills more of us each year than this flu, demands Mexican provenance down to the specific state. Though it is true that some xenophobes have used this stateless bug to bash Mexicans and all illegal aliens (whom they think are made up only of Hispanics).

In Israel one particularly observant cabinet member wanted the flu referred to only as the Mexican Flu. He was afraid that printing the word "Swine" in the paper and that even talking about it would break some kosher laws or offend either God or the Orthodox (of whom the Orthodox are stricter). I know we're not supposed to eat pork, but I do think we're allowed to say the word. Talk about the doctrine of an abundance of caution being taken to an obsessive-compulsive level. Mexico, of course objected, and even the swine were offended by being left out.

Not to be outdone, the Egyptians are slaughtering all their pigs. Now this is not too great a sacrifice. As an increasingly observant Muslim country, the pig population is not exactly vast. This is actually directed at the Christian minority and not the pigs. It is a silly policy and a great distraction from serious Egyptian problems. They have had cases of Bird Flu. They quite naturally have West Nile Virus. They are up to their ears in Schistosomiasis. And, of course, there is no evidence that you can get Swi..., I mean H1Ni from eating pork. Trichinosis, yes, flu no.

Indeed, what's in a name? You will notice that whenever Obama refers to the disease he uses its more formal name H1N1. This is to avoid stepping on any cultural, religious, nationalistic or species toes, paws hooves or trotters.

All over the world, in an absence of good information, we have silliness, panic, and over-reaction. With bullets flying (40,000 violent deaths per year in USA), cars crashing (35,000 deaths per year in USA), regular flu taking out another 35,000 per average flu season, we are cancelling events, closing schools, buying masks (Don't wear them to the bank or 7-11). We are busy looking busy, but not, I think to any great purpose.

This may or may not turn into anything, but of course, take sensible precautions: Wash your hands, cover your face when you sneeze and keep Joe Biden off of TV. Don't, however, be so distracted by fear that you miss the clear and present dangers you can do something about.

©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.org

When a Serial Killing Hits Close Too Close to Home

He always had a ready smile, tossed out a pleasant, even complimentary quip or two, and would often banter with me on the few occasions I bumped into him about the current events and issues of the day. The impression I had of John Floyd Thomas Jr. during the near decade he worked in the state agency I worked at was one of a seemingly engaged, curious even aware guy about issues. So interested, that he turned up once or twice at the weekly Los Angeles Urban Roundtable forum that I host. The roundtable brings together community leaders, activists, business leaders and elected officials to discuss hot button local and national issues. Thomas never said much, mostly listened and observed, and then was gone.

This doubled the shock I felt at the news that the outwardly, placid, non-descript Thomas could be the worst serial murderer in L.A. history. Thomas is charged with two murders and likely will be charged with others thanks to a DNA match. The grotesque, sorry, and tragic saga of Thomas once more points up the time tested painful truism, that a seemingly benign, flaccid and even seemingly upstanding family man, can be a monster who commits heinous, despicable crimes that stir fear and terror in communities and that wreak emotional trauma and havoc on the dozens of families, friends and acquaintances of his victims. The horrific and hellish nightmare they create and the deep wounds from their bloodlust sprees never fully heal. Thomas may well be the latest monster to create those searing wounds.

Thomas also points up the painful fact that serial killers can come in all shapes, sizes, and, of course, colors. Men like Thomas shatter the myth that serial killers are young, whacked out white males. It is easy to believe that. In the rash of Hollywood slasher, horror, and maniacal thrill kill films, serial killers are routinely depicted as deranged white males.

The obsessive media attention on serial killers such as Son of Sam, David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and the Unabomber also reinforce the notion that serial killers are loopy white males. There was the horde of police, profiling experts, and psychologists that paraded endlessly across the TV screen a few years ago when the Beltway serial sniper killers John Allen Muhammad and his teen deranged side kick John Malvo cold-bloodedly gunned down a dozen persons, and terrorized the Washington D.C. area. The experts reflexively bought into the racial stereotype about who the killers were and why they killed.
They were all embarrassingly and wildly wrong in their assumptions. All the old profiles and theories about who mass killers were had to be scrapped. Since then studies on serial killers that specifically looked at the race of the killers have found that blacks make up about 15 percent of America's rogue's gallery of mass murderers.

Their ghastly killings still strike fear, dread and disgust in the communities they pillaged. During the 1980s, Wayne Williams was convicted of multiple murders in Atlanta and authorities think he may have killed even more. Coral Watts claimed that he killed 13 women in several states. In the early 1990s, Cleophus Prince Jr. stabbed six women in San Diego, and authorities in East St. Louis strongly suspect a black man is responsible for a string of still unsolved killings of prostitutes in the area.

The victims of serial murderers almost always are other poor, or lower income, often single women, and in the case of the accused Thomas's victims, elderly women. They are the most defenseless and vulnerable. They are easy prey for the sick, demented, and cowardly minds of serial killers. Beneath the outwardly innocent smile of these men beat not only the heart of a monster, but our breathing stealth dirty bomb that can be planted any and everywhere and that shatters and destroy lives. For me, it's a case of serial killings that come too painfully close to home.