June 2009 Archives

If a stranger were to stop me on the street, not with the intention of mugging me but of asking what being an American means to me, I may have to say that I do not know because I may have been one of the lucky ones. I was born here. I did not have to hide and cower or over my religious convictions or political affiliations, I do not have to wear a burqa or veil for modesty of reasons or risk being stoned, and growing up, I did not have to engage in child labor laws by squatting over a loom for ten hours a day. You can't say that over many places on Earth.

While this country is not perfect, there is a reason why we have an immigration rather than an emigration problem. And that's because like it or not, this is still "the land of the free and the home of the brave." This is one of the few countries on Earth where a person can come here with nothing, set up shop and do rather well for himself. Just look at Arnold Schwartzenegger, my father, my Armenian mechanic or anyone else who came here with little more than a hope and a dream or maybe a family connection or two and made something of himself.

And this is one of the few places in the world where you can pretty much write or say anything you want without fear of being carted off in the middle of the night. That's why it always kills me when people criticize this country. Sure there are those things that are wrong, sure there is still discrimination and those who are unfairly jailed, but if someone doesn't like things, they can always work, and here's the keyword here, in appropriate ways to try and change things. Otherwise, if they find the heat not to their liking, then they can always leave the kitchen.

But unless we tighten up our laws, stop making excuses for those who have spent a lifetime making excuses for themselves and stop letting any yahoo in, then we won't remain this way for long. Otherwise, I predict we will soon be riding away into third world country land.

The general stereotype is that liberals aren't patriots. We're accused of worshipping foreign idols--usually the French. We're libeled as rooting against America and seeing only our errors and faults. This is worse than stereotype. It's caricature. You can take the most extreme and find self-hate and rejection of country. You can do the same with the extreme right. Ironically, some people who told liberals "America, love or leave it," are today threatening secession from the union.

The truth is that beyond the caricatures we draw of one another, most of us love our country. And ours is a country worth loving. Yes, we see the flaws--as we see the flaws in our own families, but please don't let anyone outside the family criticize my kids, my spouse and certainly never my grandchildren. Me? I can make a gently snide observation. You better not try. Not with my family and not with my country.

I have travelled, studied and lived all over the world, and while there're many lovely places to visit, there's no place else on earth where I'd rather live. I see our imperfect elections--Florida 2000, Ohio 2004, Chicago, well, every year. Then I look at Iran. We cannot imagine a situation like in Honduras where the president tries to change the constitution to serve his own interests, ignores his supreme court and congress and then is removed by the military. I complained about Nixon. But I never doubted he'd obey the Supreme Court's order. There was never a coup to fear.

We won't agree on many important issues, but we can and should give thanks for a nation whose founding motto is E pluribus Unum--out of many (peoples, ideas and visions) we become one nation. Happy Birthday USA!
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

What part of "it's better to ask forgiveness than permission " does a wayward husband not get?

Through a spokeswoman, Mrs. Sanford declined requests to be interviewed for this article, but told The Associated Press she learned of her husband's affair early this year when she found a letter he had written. She told him to end the relationship, but he repeatedly asked permission to visit the woman in Argentina in the months that followed.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Dr. Conrad Murray can't win. The Michael Jackson family through their surrogate Reverend Jesse Jackson hints that the doctor may have done something terribly wrong in the death of Jackson. Jackson fans were brutal. On the website vitals.com that rates physicians there were more than 100 comments (as of Saturday). The writers mostly railed against Murray as "Michael's Killer." What Murray did or didn't do in the tragic hours before the fateful 911 call that brought the paramedics rushing to Jackson's home is nothing but wild conjecture and speculation and grist for the tabloid mill.

Yet, that Murray finds himself on the medical and legal hot seat is no surprise. When things go wrong with their celebrity client-patients, doctors always feel the heat. Because invariably the things that go wrong deal with drug use, questionable medications and treatments that they allegedly give their ailing or troubled celebrity clients. The suspicion is always there that the doctors did something either negligent or unethical in catering to and indulging their clients real or imagined medical needs. The hunt to scapegoat the celebrity attendant doctor is then on with a vengeance. Their background, training, and experience are quickly called into question.

That's the case with Murray. His training at Meharry Medical College School of Medicine, one of the oldest and most renowned black medical training facilities in Nashville, Tennessee, his internships, his years of experience and work as a cardiologist are under an intense microscope. The tons of money that Murray racked up in unpaid bills, and the liens and pending suits to get the money back have been dredged up to paint Murray as a doctor with a checkered and shady history.

The glare, however, is even more intense on Murray's clinic, Global Cardiovascular Associates, main location in Las Vegas. In a call to the clinic, this writer was referred to a contact phone number to a doctor on call. The number was a pager beeper.
HealthGrades which rates America's physicians based on their training, experience, patient responses, and quality of care, did not give Global Cardiovascular Associates a glowing four star rating. In the crucial area of patient care, there were six patient responses. They rated Global Cardiovascular on ease of scheduling appointments, office environment, cleanliness and comfort, office staff friendliness, and most importantly the wait time before seeing a physician. Murray's three person staff rated only fair in the responses. Vitals. Inc. gave Global Cardiovascular a marginal rating on the critical areas of patient response time; follow up, and most importantly, accuracy of diagnosis. The clinic ranked below the national service average in a couple of these rated categories.

This is not damning proof that the clinic doses out substandard care, or is any way deficient in its medical practice. However, patients, medical rating boards and health care providers do place major emphasis on these as measures of patient care in decisions about the effectiveness and competence of physicians and their hospitals and clinics.

Even if Murray's clinic had received a world class four star rating from the rating physician services, Murray or any other doctor who attended Jackson would still raise eyebrows even if they did everything by the book. It comes with the turf.

Heart related deaths account for more medical malpractice and wrongful death lawsuits than for any other medical problem. One survey found that they account for thirty percent of all dollars shelled out by doctors and insurers to settle malpractice suits.
Malpractice awards for heart attack typically allege misdiagnosis or mismanaged diagnostic methods or medical tests. Because the outcome of a misdiagnosed heart attack is obviously poorer than a rapidly treated heart attack, the patient may suffer severe consequences. This is the prime reason that the dollar award for heart attack malpractice cases is almost always much higher than the average payout for other alleged medical screw-up cases.

It may be that Murray did not do anything wrong in how he handled Jackson. But that won't end things for Murray. He'll likely be slapped with a lawsuit, or even multiple lawsuits. That's been the lot of legions of other cardiologists. And possible lawsuits may be the least of his problems.

He will carry an even greater burden; and that's the burden of being the doctor who was there when Jackson died. And everyone expects that doctors are supposed to save lives and not raise suspicions that they did something to end a live. It's a terrible dilemma for any doctor. Dr. Murray is hardly the first to face it, but it's one he'll have to live with.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, "The Hutchinson Report" can be heard weekly in Los Angeles Fridays on KTYM Radio 1460 AM and live streamed nationally on ktym.com

I waffled for a while on how to respond to Sarkozy's announcement, and finally decided that his bag was a mixed one.

Letterman's rudeness is always mere, eh, child's play next to what those folks at The Onion usually come up with..... So when does the next round of apologies come in....?

In an earlier post I wrote that "Sex trumps substance." Well, death trumps sex, and so Iran be damned, healthcare slide by the wayside, global warming go lay down at the beach. We demand all Michael Jackson all the time. And that's an okay choice, I guess. The media are allowed to pander to the public. My objection is not to the public for having low taste or the media for feeding it. My objection is that the media gets so much so wrong.

The more I know about a particular subject, the more small mistakes I find in the coverage. This does make me temper my judgment. Sometimes when I think a paper or TV channel is twisting the news on purpose, I have to consider the possibility that it is ignorance and carelessness and not a plot or conspiracy.

There is a saying in the law--usually saved for jury instructions--that you may consider that if something is false in part, it may be false in its entirety. So what to make of the thousand paper cuts of inaccuracies in the Michael Jackson story?

I first learned of his death when a national cable network had a reporter, obviously unfamiliar with the Los Angeles area, report that Jackson had died in Bell. Knowing Bell, I was pretty confident that he would not, in fact, be caught dead in Bell. I guess she meant Bel Air(e). That too would have been wrong, but closer. Then I heard that he had collapsed in his rented mansion in Beverly Hills. Also not true. By evening the local TV coverage had it right, Holmby Hills, but even this morning the BBC was reporting that he died in Hollywood.

I happened to be in Westwood last night going to the Geffen Theatre and saw all the helicopters and TV trucks--as well as a fair number of print reporters hurrying back home at 7pm. There were some people gathered around but hardly a mob. It looked like the same number you would see stop for a car wreck. While having our dinner earlier, the TV coverage made it look like a huge and growing crowd. When we left the theatre around 9:50pm the civilians had mostly gone home. The few gawkers remaining were watching the field reporters for our local stations prepare or tape their stand up reports. You know the "Live from UCLA where 8 hours ago something happened is our own (fill in the blank) __________with our exclusive eyewitness report."

Meanwhile, nature and the media abhorring a vacuum, we got wall-to-wall coverage, speculation and misinformation. As late as this afternoon NPR reported that crowds were gathering around Michael's star on Hollywood Blvd, but some fans had mistakenly put their flowers of the star of the wrong Michael Jackson, whom NPR misidentified as "the disc jockey Michael Jackson." Our own Michael Jackson, the talk show host who virtually the invented the form, has not been a disc jockey since 1960.

If we in the media do not get the small things right, how can we have credibility with the big issues?
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

The news was and is shocking and sad. Michael Jackson is dead. Not only is it shocking because we weren't prepared for it, as we were for the loss of Farrah Fawcett just hours before or Ed McMahon who at eighty-two had already lived a full life, but it is sad because Michael Jackson was only fifty years old.

But he sure packed a lot into those years. First, there was that immense genius and talent. Who else but a genius would have conceived of the video for "Thriller," which was not only a music video but really a movie short that helped launch the MTV network? And who else but a genius would have come up with the "Moonwalk" or some of his other creations that became part of the pop lexicon? Though it should come as no surprise because it was clear from his early appearances on the "Ed Sullivan Show" that music and dance were part of his soul.

It was his genius, the ability to move as if he were walking on air, and to take the mundane and combine it in new and unusual ways that catapulted him to fame and made him stay there even amidst all the controversies in his life.

And there were plenty. First, there were the molestation charges brought about after he hosted slumber parties at his house with young boys. Of course, he should have known better, and common sense should dictate that a grown man who invites young boys to sleep over at his house is going to be headed for trouble, but because Jackson probably wanted to relive parts of his childhood, as is evidenced by naming his ranch "Neverland" after Peter Pan, the other boy who also never grew up, it probably made sense to him. Not for a moment do I think that Michael Jackson was a pedophile who intentionally tried inflicting harm on children, but one who wanted to fill in the missing pieces of his childhood.

Then there were his financial problems, his failed marriages and the incident where he wrapped a blanket around his own son and dangled him from a hotel balcony. (What was he thinking?)

When all is said and done, he probably won't be remembered for any of those things. He was acquitted of the molestation charges, he was planning on going on tour next month and his children, who are reportedly grieved, did not seem to hate him or seem otherwise maladjusted.

It takes a rare talent to trump the passing of two other celebrities within the same week, a rigged election in Iran and another one of Obama's proposals. But Michael Jackson could and did because he was a larger-than-life talent who brought music and joy to this world, and he will be missed.

Just as necessity is the mother of invention, the fear of death is the mother of religion, of the quest for transcendence and the hope of immortality. Death makes us wildly irrational. Death, especially an untimely passing, is what turns ordinary and flawed people into martyrs and what turns ordinary and flawed politicians into enduring legends. Death makes hard people soft, death makes people ashamed to remember past sins and slights by the deceased, death makes every one of its victims stand larger in our memories as being bigger and better than they were. Death makes us lose all perspective -- and in so doing, death reveals much about us as poor, fearful, mortal creatures. In a week in which we are thinking much about the deaths of famous persons, that is all I will say about death.

There is nothing like a good sex scandal to get the juices flowing. It is so much easier to pose and posture about something that we can understand--and many even have experience with sex--scandalous or not. Healthcare policies or the nuances of Iranian elections or tactics in Afghanistan ate too complicated for credible pontificating.

So here is poor Gov. Sandford confessing to his adultery with his Argentine lover. The press loves the detail about her being from Argentina. Exotic.

Some would see a political pattern here, following close on the soiled sheets of Senator Ensign and his affair with a campaign aid and Sen. Larry Craig's sad tryst in a men's room in Minneapolis and Sen. Vitter's consorting with professionals. Some are charging that this is a Republican conservative family values trend. It isn't. Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer, not to mention John Edwards prove this to be a bipartisan failing. I am tempted to say that it is male failing, but aside from Sen. Craig, females seem also to participate.

Adultery is not a partisan issue. It does not break down by left or right. It is not Christian versus Jewish or Catholic versus Protestant. It is a human weakness. It wrecks careers, brings down governments, and tears families apart. This week there is a report of a bunch of Mennonites charged with mass rape in Latin America.

Yes, there is a certain value added in the schadefreude department when there is not simply cheating--which is largely a personal family issue--but also hypocrisy. All of our political fallen, except Bill Clinton, were guilty of hypocrisy--preaching family values, condemning other fallen sinners and pretending to values that they did not live. Only Clinton, who may have been guilty of perjury and was certainly guilty of lust and abuse of power, escapes the hypocrisy charge. He never really pretended to be anything other than a salty dog. The other guys look worse because they organized much of their lives around lies--condemning the weakness of others while failing miserably with their own lives.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

In a recent interview with Bill O'Reilly, Republican pundit Ann Coulter sloughed off the murder of abortion doctor, George Tiller, as a "termination in the 203 trimester." Not being a flag-waving, white-haired Republican wearing a flag pin, I am in favor of abortion, though this view probably comes, in part, from having dealt with too many customer service representatives and likewise too many daft people.

Besides, a fetus is not the same as a fully formed adult. Fetuses do not drive cars or go to medical school. Fetuses do not take out bad mortgages that plunge us into a near depression and they do not cut other drivers off to maneuver their car into a parking space at the mall. Fetuses are nicer than that.

So if Ann Counter and the moral majority feel so strongly about it, then they can always carry and raise these kids themselves, or better yet, hire themselves out as nannies. Let them show up at school after one of their charges has broken a window, assaulted a dean or written some choice words on school property. Let them go to the police station at 3:00 a.m. If nothing else, it may lead them into an epiphany where they will become staunch supporters of the other side and march alongside their (former) liberal foes at some pro-abortion rallies.

Social conservatives will soon tire of liberals' snickering about the latest true confessions of philandering GOP would-be presidential candidates. I think the larger problem for the conservative faithful is that they've gleefully led a divisive culture war in recent decades, condemning media and universities for warping the values of the mainstream. So I don't think they convince others when they then blame innate human weakness for their own foibles; they'd been arguing that their way is better and healthier. If they're going to maintain that position, it would be more credible if they focused less on cultural street fights and moralizing on Fox News, which then leads to a loss of credibility when "life happens."

I'm going to disagree with Jonathan regarding Iran. Some critics of Obama are praising him for finally indicating more clearly that he's "outraged" by the violence by the Iranian government -- as if he was previously indicating that he was heartened by it. I've written at greater length on the issue here.

But let's remember that much of that nation is pro-government. If violence continues, we'll soon have martyrs on both sides (if we already don't), and martyrdom is a powerful force in a nation such as that. The more that we talk now, at a moment when talk means nothing, the more someone will accuse us later of having "blood on our hands." Right now, it's the Iranian government that has blood on its hands. And when an opponent is destroying himself, why get involved? That only turns a suicide into a homicide.

I think that President Obama has done a pretty good job in terms of his public pronouncements concerning the unrest, revolt, or incipient revolution in Iran. He has, however not been pitch perfect. His critics have a compelling moral point. His is a conflict between political pragmatism and ethical idealism.

As is his wont, he's been subtle and nuanced in public. Giving outright support to those protesting and being beaten and killed in the streets, would not be doing them a favor. Iran's illegitimate president is already calling the protestors terrorists and puppets of England and America.

Obama has criticized the violence of the regime without endorsing, perhaps fatally, the followers of Mir Hossein Mousavi. He has warned the regime that "The world is watching." He has rightly refused to predict that Mir Hossein Mousavi would be far better for America. Even if we knew this to be true--which we don't (he was an original companion of Ayatollah Khomeini), I'm pretty secure that Mousavi would not find our endorsement helpful--even as I'm sure he is not delighted by Netanyahu's praise.

Obama's critics, mostly on the right, say that his pronouncements have been tepid, weak and not very stirring. His defenders say that the critics are crazed warmongers encouraging us to recklessness and giving the protestors hope of help they will never receive. As we encouraged East Germans to revolt and abandoned them, as we enticed Hungarians to rebel and sent no aid, as we baited the Shiites in Iraq after the First Gulf War and left them to be slaughtered by Saddam, false hope is not a friendly gift.

And yet, as well as Obama has done, I do not think that the views of some of his critics are without merit. We do say that we believe in free elections. We do support people's right to protest peacefully. We deplore the slaughter of innocents and general political thuggery. So why not speak out? Why is it wrong to state our beliefs and principals? Do pragmatic politics trump ethics and values? This is a fair question.

During WWII two great Jewish leaders battled over how hard to lobby FDR about the persecution of the Jews in Europe. This persecution, of course, became much more and much worse--growing into the Shoah, the Holocaust, the attempted destruction of the Jewish People. Both leaders were good and decent people. Stephan S. Wise counseled caution and understanding of the political pressures on FDR. He loved the cause no less than Abba Hillel Silverman, but he didn't want to make political waves. He was a realist. Silverman was less cautious. He counseled activism. Damn FDR and his political needs or the blowback from those who already charged Roosevelt with being a secret Jew (Kind of like Obama being a secret Muslim). He believed the disaster was so great that political calculations were immoral.

After the war, this conflict was much discussed. Had FDR spoken more forcefully about the evil of the Nazis and the horrors of the Holocaust, I am not sure a single Jewish life would have been saved. That is a pragmatic calculation. However, I believe that FDR should have spoken the truth, our truth, put in a word for us and even if the trains had still run on time to Auschwitz, we would have known that the world was watching--and not simply watching but speaking, protesting and weeping for us.

Yes, nuance is important and restraint is to be admired, but sometimes the transgressions are so egregious, so horrifying that verbal caution needs to be cast aside and truth--uncomfortable and harsh truth--has to be proclaimed to power.

Protestors shot down in the streets are not subtle acts, and subtle responses are lost on a regime that already hates us and many of its own people. Speaking with passion against the violence of the Iranian government could hardly make them despise us more, and it would give some company and comfort to those bleeding in the streets.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is committed to remaining our mayor for another four years. This is the good news. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is planning on remaining our mayor for another four years. This is also the bad news.

We in Los Angeles will do our part for the great state of California by keeping Antonio to ourselves and sparing the state from the unlikely and unhappy prospect of Villaraigosa actually becoming our Governor.

Frankly, anyone who wanted to be governor would be quite mad and therefore not qualified. Anyone elected--and tragically someone will win--should demand a recount. I know I would!
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

On Monday, June 29, U.S. District Judge Gary A. Feess may finally rule on whether the LAPD consent decree should be lifted. He should not delay or hesitate in lifting it. In times past, I have been a fierce and relentless critic of the LAPD on excessive use of force, its lackluster and indifferent handling of citizen complaints, rigid military style command, failure to weed out or discipline problem officers, racial profiling, tepid recruitment of and promotion of minority officers, and half measured community policing. But that was the LAPD of a decade ago, not today.

In the crucial areas from use of excessive force to discipline to community policing, the LAPD has raised its game to a level of professionalism, integrity, and racial sensitivity that is a model for police departments nationally. The proof is in a recent poll that shows a decisive majority of Latino and African-American L.A. residents praise the department for its crime fighting and community outreach. The LAPD has shed its dreaded image of an occupying army in these communities.

The LAPD has done the heavy lifting to fulfill virtually everything mandated by the consent decree. It has taken a giant step toward burying its odious past. Judge Feess should recognize the new department reality and lift the decree.

Even by the nut case standard of the assorted pack of neo-Nazi unreconstructed Klan members, Aryan Nation haters, and the legion of loose screw religious cranks and loonies, the Reverend Wiley S. Drake's public prayer for the death of President Obama stretched far past the outer limit of credulity. The unrepentant Drake did not back away from the prayer when asked about it by Alan Colmes on Fox News Radio on June 2. He pleaded that he didn't understand why people were upset with his comments.
Drake is not just a garden variety religious crank. In 2006, he reigned as the second vice president of the nearly 20 million strong Southern Baptist Convention. The group is by far the nation's biggest evangelical denomination. He pastors a bonafide church, the First Southern Baptist Church in the middle-class bedroom city of Buena Park, California. Drake has his own popular radio show on the Crusade Radio Network. In April, Southern Baptist Convention spokesperson Richard Land even had kind words for Obama for his family values emphasis.

Convention officials, though, were far less forthright about Wiley's death prayer death for Obama. It issued a perfunctory statement saying that his views were his and his alone. It did not vigorously denounce those views, especially his Obama death prayer.
Wiley skirted the legal definition of what constitutes a threat to the president by attributing the death prayer to a phony, made up prayer from God. The operative term is willful in the federal statute that makes it an offense to threaten the president. It's punishable by up to five years in prison. Every year, the Secret Service investigates about 1500 reported or discovered threats to the president. Drake's God attribute threat didn't escape their attention.

But Drake doesn't just speak for Drake, and a handful of cranks, but says what more than a few ultra conservative, religious fundamentalists actually think and belief, and in their scariest and darkest moments the violence they actually wish for. With the murder of Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, the Holocaust Museum shoot-up, the recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center on a surge in hate groups, and the demand by a worried US Attorney General Eric Holder for a tougher hate law, death threats against public figures can't be shrugged off.

This writer, however, couldn't let Drake's purported death prayer on Obama lightly pass. So I had a little talk with him mostly to give him another chance to back off his prayer.
Here's an excerpt from the June 19 talk with Drake:
"Did you actually pray for President Obama's death?"
"No, I was merely citing an imprecatory prayer which in scripture is a prayer mandated by God to smite down the enemies....those that do evil."
"So you're saying that you did not actually call for Obama's death?"
"I was asked in an interview about the murder of Kansas doctor George Tiller and I said in an imprecatory prayer that Tiller who was responsible for the murder of thousands of children was given a chance at salvation and that didn't happen so he was condemned in prayer to die. I had no regrets about his death. I was then asked if the imprecatory prayer for the death of evil doers could even extend to the president. I said yes. I was merely citing a prayer."

"Do you stand by that?"
"Unfortunately in the interview I said Obama. I'm not wanting (sic) the president dead. The prayer for his death is not my prayer but comes from God."
Drake said since the story hit he's gotten personal death threats and threats to picket and even burn down his church. The unrepentant Drake laughed them off saying he had nothing to fear since he was doing God's work.
A final question:
"Pastor will you come on my weekly radio show and explain to listeners the reason for citing a prayer against the president?"
"I'd better talk to my attorney first."
Stay tuned on that one.

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

The revolution will not be televised; it is, however, being blogged and twittered. Almost all media--including cable--was missing in action last weekend. This weekend they are far more present--except for MSNBC. Shamefully, MSNBC and NBC have abandoned any pretense of being in the news business. NBC national is carrying golf and cable is rerunning crime shows. Are there no longer adults at the network--or is that the problem, and they just don't understand the new technology?

If newspapers used to be "the first draft of history," they are no longer. They are the third or forth draft. Slow but more reliable and with context and analysis. TV and live coverage gave immediacy to a truly breaking news story--not the constant "Breaking News!" chiron we see scrolling at the bottom of the screen which means nothing. Then the Internet gave the real first shot of news. Often without context or reliable analyses, but fast and impactful. Now, with cell phones and smart phones there is true live blogging and twittering.

The cable stations are reproducing twitters and blogs. They are showing citizen clips posted on YouTube and Face book. The better news aggregating web sites are following in real time--and whether the unrest in Iran is a revolution or civil war, whether it ends with no change or only blood, one question is settled and that is about the Mainstream Media. They are out to lunch and out of touch with both the real breaking news and the next generation.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

What do angry Iranians and angry House congressmen have in common? Answer here.

Now that is tyranny.

I guess the controversy could have been avoided if only Letterman replaced A-Rod in his joke with the Italian prime minister.

I love Obama. What a refreshing change from (brace yourself, I'm NOT taking a shot a Bush) so many previous presidents, politicians and, let's face it, men.

Clinton had a fly problem. JFK had a fly problem. So too Eisenhower, FDR and, hard as it is to imagine, there were stories about Nixon. Clearly Spitzer couldn't keep it to himself and turned to professionals--as did Vitter. Edwards seems not to have taken any kind of sensible precautions. Larry Craig's stance is widely known. Our own Mayor Antonio has pattern of being in bed with the press.

Truly it is something new that when Obama had a fly problem, as he did this week, it is an insect and not part of his pants.

But to prove the toxicity of our political environment, Obama is being excoriated by PETA (People for the ethical treatment of animals). In a blistering press release they condemn him for not capturing the fly buzzing around him and releasing back into nature. Instead he wantonly, and without any thought for the fly, slapped it dead. Where was compassion? Where was due process? Oh the insecta, the insecta.

I was having dinner with a morally conservative couple a few years back, when the wife joked about how her husband was eyeing a fetching waitress -- prompting him to bellow, "How dare you?!?!" She withered, as did our evening. I realized he was outraged by the insinuation of "wrongdoing," but he seemed too defensive.

Now Todd and Sarah Palin, the parents of at least one sexually active teen who snubbed their moral teachings, are outraged that a talk-show host would poke fun of the Palins for having family problems. That's Letterman -- always irreverent and rude, regularly poking fun of Bill Clinton for being a slut long before even Monica-gate. Like it or don't, but the indignance is tiresome. The Palin teens are not "off limits," given how the McCain campaign exploited them. At last, Levi Johnston's assessment of the Palin parents indicates they're a bigger threat to the maintenance of conservative values than Letterman is.

The issue for me was never Bristol Palin and whether she heeded mama Palin's sanctimonious preachment of abstinence, nor was it what kind of parent mama Palin is. The issue was never mama Palin's preachments, let alone her. The issue was never whether Bristol was fair game for ridicule just because mama Palin is a ridiculous public figure herself. The issue was a stupid, insipid, deeply sexist, and derogatory unfunny crack from an on the make hack comedian who masquerades as a fount of wisdom late night talk show host and who's in an eternal hunt to get one-upmanship on his talk show rival Leno.

Letterman quickly saw the handwriting on the wall, or better still the picket signs out front of the studio, and apologized profusely for his idiotic crack, or as he lamely put it, flawed attempt at humor. Letterman in the process did something that I thought was humanly impossible; and that's make Palin look like the paragon of the unjust aggrieved mom and worse still a political victim, and even worse still, a gracious victim when she accepted the apology. Letterman, Letterman.

David Letterman's joke about Sarah Palin's fourteen-year-old daughter, Willow, being knocked up by Alex Rodriguez in the seventh inning was in bad taste, but rather sloughing it off, the Palins blew the whole thing out of proportion by issuing a comment implying that Letterman is a pervert. He's a comic who sometimes makes bad jokes and sometimes doesn't and this one belonged in the junk pile.

Either way, methinks I smell a rat in the Palin household and maybe even some guilt. While teenagers can get in all sorts of trouble, most of them don't wind up becoming parents, so it looks like the Palins are questioning their parenting skills and judgment.

The peeved Palins were right, however, when they said that Letterman wouldn't have made a comment like that about other people' s (meaning the Obama's) kids. First off, he would have had nothing to base it on and second, he would have had Al Sharpton and the NAACP practically knocking down his door.

Our society sends out crazy mixed up signals about how we value children and what kind of role models we adults should be. A student at graduation blows a kiss to his mother and his kicked off the stage. Well so much for, "Honoring thy father and mother." I guess officials need to be officious and look at the rules and not the intent. God help us if anyone used common sense.

Then there's the Sarah and David show, and I speak of course not of the biblical Sarah and David but Palin and Letterman. Letterman made a bad joke that was in poor taste about what he thought was Bristol--the 18 year-old unwed mother spokesperson for abstinence--at a Yankee game. The problem was the girl in attendance was Willow the 14 year old. Palin naturally assumed it was aimed at Willow and was rightly offended. She complained. He apologized. Should have been the end of the story.

Palin went on the attack for all women and girls and implied that Dave was a pervert who couldn't be trusted. Dave apologized again. Then Palin supporters, witnessing for family values and the moral high road, picketed Letterman's studio with family friendly signs attacking the mother of Letterman's child as a "slut." I guess because they had a baby before they got married.

Frankly, Bristol is fair game--because her mother put her on the national stage and enables her to go around giving talks on abstinence--irony free. Still, it is a bad idea to attack the children of famous people. Whether on a graduation or national stage can adults ever be role models of sense and civility? Probably not.

Shephard Smith worries that anti-Obama violence is in the air, here in a clip from Fox. This won't be popular with those who feel that Obama's administration is planning on rounding them up for daring to oppose mandatory abortions. But Frank Rich argues that, just as it took McCain's best efforts to calm down the people calling the eventual US president a treacherous terrorist, the GOP's leaders must calm down the people who are signaling their intention to "put an end to the false prophet Obama." Camille Paglia, herself a critic of Obama, shares some concerns about the threats against him here.

In 1998 at the height of the Bill Clinton impeachment fight, Nevada REPUBLICAN Senate candidate John Ensign got on his moral high horse and demanded that Bill Clinton to resign.
In 2007, when now former Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) was arrested in an airport men's room, now REPUBLICAN Senator Ensign again mounted his moral high horse and demanded that Craig resign.
REPUBLICAN Senator Ensign is a self-proclaimed born again Christian and member in good stead of Promise Keepers, the staunch evangelical group that urges men to keep God's commandment and to be ever faithful in marriage.
The $64 Dollar Question: Will Ensign mount his moral high horse again and demand that he resign?

Never heard the case against summer vacation made as well as it is here.

"I will tell you that I don't believe in gay marriage."
"I believe in civil unions but it should not be called marriage."
Then Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said that during a campaign stop in Nelsonville, Ohio a day before the Super II Tuesday primary in March 2008. The great puzzle then is why so many are so hot at President Obama for backing the Defense of Marriage Act. He has not backed a step away from his Ohio campaign stump words.
His unshakeable personal, political and legal belief is that the only marriage that can be called marriage is between a man and a woman. This has absolutely nothing to do with his solid, and at times outspoken, tout of anti-discrimination, civility, and just plain human respect for gay rights. He has backed that in speeches and legislation 18 times before he grabbed the White House.

This still doesn't change his firm belief that marriage is marriage only when it's between a man and a woman. Gay groups, the mayors of Los Angeles and San Francisco, and some congresspersons, can scream at him to withdraw the Justice Department's brief filed seeking the dismissal of the legal challenge to the DOMA in a federal court in California. They can bash him as a flip flop and a betrayer of his campaign promises on gay rights. This still ignores the bitter truth that candidate Obama and now president Obama has been the paragon of consistency, even honesty, in opposing same sex marriage. This has nothing to do with politics, but his personal belief layered over with a tinge of religious interpretation, since he's cited conflicted passages from the Bible, to square his support of gay rights with his opposition to legalizing same sex marriage.

Obama's rock solid belief in traditional marriage was plainly evident at the opening gun of his presidential campaign in South Carolina in January 2008. He ignored loud protests and shouts for him to dump gay challenged gospel singer Donnie McClurkin from his three date barnstorm tour through the state. The show complete with McClurkin went on. Critics naively chalked the McClurkin-Obama link up to his frantic need to grab the black vote away from rival Hillary Clinton. Politics no doubt was at play big in the McClurkin decision. But McClurkin was also a wildly popular and compelling singer and preacher who stirred the passions of hard nosed evangelical blacks in South Carolina and other must win states. McClurkin also stirred Obama's religious passions as well. Though McClurkin pleaded that he was not anti-gay, it did not change one whit his view and that of all other black evangelicals that same sex marriage is a Biblical abomination.

Bush masterfully tapped that homophobic sentiment among fundamentalist religious blacks in 2000 in part with McClurkin and even more masterfully in 2004 again with McClurkin and the top gun mega black preachers in Ohio and Florida. He tapped it so masterfully that Bush's naked pander to gay bashing with the GOP spawned anti-gay marriage initiative in Ohio did much to win over a big chunk of black evangelical leaning voters to him. A Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies poll in 2004 found that blacks by a far larger margin than the overall population opposed gay marriage. This raised a few eyebrows among some political pundits, but there were much earlier signs of blacks' relentless hostility to gays and gay rights.

In Florida and Wisconsin, Republicans aggressively courted and wooed key black religious leaders. They dumped big bucks from Bush's Faith-Based Initiative program into church-run education and youth programs. Black church leaders not only endorsed Bush but in some cases they actively worked for his re-election, and encouraged members of their congregations to do the same.

Polls show that more Americans than ever say that they support civil rights for gays, and a torrent of gay themed TV shows present non-stereotypical depictions of gays. However, this increased tolerance has not dissipated the hostility that far too many blacks, especially hard core Bible thumping blacks, feel toward gay marriage. California Proposition 8 backers quickly wised up to this and corraled a pack of fundamentalist black religious leaders in Los Angeles and other areas to stir up their flock against legalizing gay marriage. Then they got ticked at Obama for the White House's stone silence when the state supreme court backed the measure. The White House silence was no surprise.

The other big knock against Obama is that he didn't have to do anything on the DOMA; that he could have easily kept the White House's nose out of it by letting the legal challenge to it run its course. Other presidents have done that when they thought a law was unconstitutional or unjust.

This argument is tone deaf to what Obama has said and feels about traditional marriage too. Given that conviction his defense of the DOMA should not surprise or anger anyone.

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

Okay, the title is a lie. There is no understanding Iran. There are facts, there is a search for patterns and there is a lot of history. Still, understanding will continue to elude us.

The common wisdom is, as the word "common" implies, probably wrong. Sure Ahmadinejad may have stolen the election. But that is far from certain. That it was rigged is likely, but the stolen question misses an important point. Rather like the police framing OJ, they may have cheated but they framed a guilty man. Ahmadinejad might have won fair and square, but the mullahs calculated that a big point spread would cause fewer problems than Florida-like finish with both sides claiming victory and refusing to recognize the elected government as legitimate. The mullahs may have miscalculated.

Most of us in the west just assumed that the liberal reformer, Moussavi, would win in a fair election. He is who we would vote for, and he was the candidate of most of the Iranians we saw interviewed on TV. We figured, mostly correctly, that educated people living in the cities would be more likely to vote for him than for Ahmadinejad.

We forgot, however, to calculate our observational bias. We interviewed city people. We telephone polled people who, well, had telephones. Our media preferred talking to people who spoke English. Hmmmm. How could we go wrong considering that this demographic is a minority in a country of rural poor, seriously religious, non-English speaking and telephonically deprived.

Nor is the common wisdom necessarily correct in so far as the mullahs are concerned. They are not monolithic supporters of Ahmadinejad. He is not only an embarrassment in his crude populism, but he also has forged an alliance with the military. His support of bellicose rhetoric, arms programs and nuclear ambition puts him and the military establishment in conflict with many of the mullahs. In Iran, as in Pakistan, the military is not simply the army. It is also militias, political groups and a force in industry.
We understood correctly that true democracy was unlikely even with a more or less liberal president because the Mullahs could veto any policy. We did not understand that the military can do to the Mullahs what they do to elected officials. They are a major political and economic force--not a narrow special interest. A close winning alliance of the military and Ahmadinejad would be a disaster, making us long for the good old day of the once-mighty mullahs.

We in the west just assumed that Moussavi was a good guy and his election would change everything. This was based only on a hope and the calculation that anyone would be better than Ahmadinejad. We should have known that he was associated with the original revolution and Ayatollah Khomeini. He has a reputation for guile and corruption, and did not get where is by being soft on Israel or an America-phile. He might well have been better but he was not the coming of the messiah.

Finally, as we look at the protests in the streets of Tehran, some are saying this is good for America and that it might be the start of another revolution. These are possibilities, but neither singularly nor linked are they self-evidently good. The young, educated and urban could be crushed, and a civil war could push the military into distracting adventures. Another unstable regime in the region is not to be wished for.

This is a good time, as they say about some cancers, for "watchful waiting" and not for an heroic intervention into their mess. If our recent history in the Muslim world should teach us anything it is this: We do not understand as much as we think, as much as we can nor as much as we should.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

In January, Pittsbugh mayor Luke Ravenstahl and the city council briefly toyed with the idea of canceling the Superbowl champion Steelers victory parade. The reason: cost. They'd have to foot the estimated half million dollar tab to pay for it. City officials just couldn't see any way to justify shelling out the cash when they had to slash city services and lay off municipal workers. In the end, city officials coughed up the cash and the parade went on.

As bad as things were, Pittsburgh was not in the terrible shape that L.A is with a budget shortfall of half billion dollars and pending city employee cuts, furloughs, and a drastic slash in services. This makes a Laker victory parade seem like a wasteful and indulgent frill.

At the same time, the ever loyal Laker fans, the team, and the city deserve to let the throngs revel at a public Laker championship celebration on Figueroa.
Laker co-owner Jerry Buss can make that happen. The Lakers are fat financially. According to Forbes in 2008, the Lakers were the second financially healthiest NBA franchise. The team was valued at nearly $600 million and had a net operating revenue of nearly $200 million. Buss and co owner Philip Anschutz are worth an estimated worth $8 billion. The fans forked over on average $107 dollar per ticket. This padded gate receipts to nearly $100 million. That's not too shabby for a team that Buss laid out $20 million for three decades ago. The estimated $1 million tab that the victory parade will cost then in the larger Laker profit scheme of things is a mere pittance.

President Obama and Governor Schwarzenegger have repeatedly implored everyone to sacrifice and help in whatever way they can to beat back the financial crisis. And those with the deepest pockets should do even more to help.

Buss can spare Los Angeles city officials the agony of having to make the painful decision of whether to cancel the parade or not. He can cough up a few dollars to make sure there's no rain on this parade. It will hardly break the bank.

There were two things wrong with the good Reverend Jeremiah Wrights's grouse that "them Jews are keeping me from Obama." Oops, I mean the Zionists, not Jews. That was Wright's nimble effort to take some heat off him for the silly crack. One was that he said it. The other is that he meant it. Wright's "them Jews" quip was vintage Wright. That's his penchant to shoot from the lip, damn the audience and consequences, and knowing full well that it will get the tongues furiously wagging. The correction was a trifle which meant nothing.
It still confirmed what Wright loathers firmly belief and that's that he's a loose cannon, closet racist, and anti-Semite. The timing of his crack coming on the heels of the shoot up of the Holocaust Memorial Museum by neo-Nazi looney, James Wennaker von Brunn, couldn't have been worse. Wright is no von Brunn. He has not turned his life into a crusade against the mythical Jewish domination, and has never advocated violence against anyone. He's a down-home, plain spoken, Afrocentric preacher, who had enough charisma to attract throngs, and keep them coming back week after week to his one time Southside Chicago church. One of whom was a soon to be president.

That's a big reason Wright made the silly, intemperate knock. Wright still thinks that he's due a seat at Obama's table. Never mind that the universal consensus is that one of the smartest things that Obama did was to dump Wright, and dump him fast after he became a political embarrassment. But it's the seat at the table part that makes the Wright dig revealing. It's not just Wright's ego, although there's plenty of that at work in the notion that Obama won't see or have anything to do with him because of some plot by mythical Jewish gatekeepers to keep him away. It wouldn't have mattered if not one member of Team Obama's inner circle was Jewish. Wright would still be banned in Boston at the White House.

The Wright dig does hurt in another way though. There's still the widely prevalent belief among much of the public that more than a few blacks are closet anti-Semites, and even in the more bizarre circles, a rumor to that effect is occasionally heard about President Obama. That was heard after his pointed admonition to the Israeli government to crack down on the building of the settlements on the West Bank. The settlement expansion has been widely and repeatedly criticized by diplomats, political leaders, and a wide section of Israeli public opinion.

Wright, though, went one step further and poured oil on the flame by branding the Gaza battles, "ethnic cleansing." But it's still the suspicion that many blacks are anti-Semitic that rankles and resonates the most. Two decades later, Jesse Jackson still takes hits for his "Hymietown" crack, and Al Sharpton takes a hit on occasion for some alleged anti-Semitic act. Former Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan, is still virtually interchangeable with anti-Semite.

Anti-Semitism is alive and well in America, and it didn't take the the murder at the Holocaust Memorial Museum by a deranged, delusional nut to prove that. The legion of neo Nazi websites, videos, and books, pamhplets, that rail against Jewish or Zionist conspiracies under every bedpost, even the bedposts in the Obama White House are ample proof of that. But African-American leaders, officials and organizations have always vigorously condemned and fought against anti-Semitism. The heroic sacrifice of Stephen Tyrone Johns, the African American security guard, who gave his life to save others at the Holocaust Memorial Museum was tragic and symbolic of the long history of blacks and Jews fighting against racial biogtry and anti-Semitism. The good Reverend Wright's pithy, loose tongued crack won't change that.

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

This is my piece today for Foreign Policy mag's online version, part of a larger debate about "the Obama effect."

So the hard right in this country is rooting for Ahmadinejad. And, not coincidentally, so is bad guy Hugo Chavez. Strange bedfellows indeed.
Sometimes it seems like there is no learning from history. Experience doesn't matter and wisdom eludes us. This is not a new thing, not the tragedy of modern times. It is a deeply human form of denial and obduracy.

The English lost their Empire in Afghanistan, as did the Soviets. We thought, or God help us still think, we can do better. The French lost both their Empire and their dignity in Vietnam. But we thought we could show them a thing or two. The Communists in Weimar Germany supported Hitler because they thought that he would be so obviously inept that they would come to power sooner. Their motto was: "Nach Hitler, uns." Or, "After Hitler, us." Didn't work out for them, for Germany or for the world.

This is the type of thinking that is behind the Neo-con support for Ahmadinejad. Not that they get a vote, but still it is revelatory of their stubborn refusal to learn from history. Making bad things worse seldom sets the table for making things better. It is often easier to fix a leak than repair the consequences of a flood. See Hurricane Katherine.

The world is difficult enough, violent and irrational enough that we do not have to make them worse on purpose. Helping find more moderate people to talk with--even fruitlessly--seems better than helping sustain monsters whom we can bomb. As Churchill remarked "Chaw chaw is better than war war."
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

There is a long tradition of grown ups giving "good advice" to the young and trying to impart their accumulated wisdom. This is a fool's errand. Wisdom only comes over time, and like democracy in the Middle East, can't be imposed from outside. From God suggesting not to eat the fruit in the Garden Eden, to Polonius, in Hamlet, filling his son Laertes' head with platitudes, the record of advice giving is not hopeful. Adam and Eve are banished and Polonius and Laertes are both run through with swords. The modern classic good advice talk implores the youth to slather on sunscreen.

So, imagining myself in front of a bunch of high school or college seniors, with some trepidation, but few illusions, I enter the arena to share with you the very most important thing I know--and it is really quite simple.

If we are lucky and diligent, we will make friends, some of whom will turn out to be good friends. These special people in our lives are a product of luck, chemistry and some effort. They ride with us through life--sharing our good times and bad, our triumphs and tragedies. Some of these people we see often. We are in constant touch and really keep up with each other. Because of the everyday nature of these friendships, we do not notice them growing old or changing. They just are--like the earth and sky, like family.

Other friends may be more distant in time and space. We may not see them regularly but when we do, it is as if no time had passed. We pick up right where we left off a year or a decade before. Since we do not see them age or change, when we do get together it is sometimes a shock. Where is the rail thin girl? What happened to the athletic young man, and where did his hair go? But after that first moment, our eyes adjust and we see them back with the old pictures in our heads of them in their youth, with the eyes of our youth.

Sometimes I joke that I have only one core message and every talk or article is a repetition of this: "Despite how large and complex the world is and how small and powerless we sometimes feel, what we choose and what we do make a difference." I believe this profoundly. But it is not my one message. I have another: "Time is the only gift we have that is worth giving." Where and with whom we spend the precious time that is our lives indicates what we value and whom we value. Time, once spent, can never be spent again, but neither can it be rendered into nothingness as long as we live.

The wise would not avoid the pain of loss by not having had friendships. There is no wisdom in saving our hearts from breaking by not giving them. My lesson for you today is quite simple, but hard to do when young: Take pictures with your hearts of those who love you and whom you love. Keep them as a treasury to draw on. Neither our vulnerability nor mortality itself is the enemy of life. They are but reminders of how precious each day, each kiss and each embrace is.

Ecclesiastes, my favorite book of the bible, offers this very good advice: "Eat thy bread with joy and drink thy wine with a merry heart," and "Live joyfully with thy mate whom thou lovest all the days of thy life."

And yes, do remember to slather on the sunscreen.

©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

The reports were all good, bad and ugly. Anti-Semitism is supposedly down nationally (good), yet it is up worldwide (bad) and has increased by seven percent in California (ugly), but this is the bonehead capitol of the country, so what can anyone expect?

So I am going to dispel ten common myths about Jews to help set things straight.

1.) Why are Jews so cheap?
We are not cheap. We happen to give more charity than any other ethnic group. Speaking of which, can I write you up for a donation?

2.) What about Bernard Madoff?
Every ethnic group has its ones that fell off the wagon. The Germans had Pope John Paul II, who seemed like a decent enough fellow, but they also spawned Hitler. You can't judge the whole barrel by a few bad apples.

3.) Why do Jews like money?
Other than hippies, have you ever met anyone who didn't like money? Money is not the root of all evil. If used properly, it is the root of all good.

4.) Why do Jews sing when they pray?
Because we like music bunch.

5.) Why do Jewish men make good husbands?
Because they were raised by Jewish women. Why else?

6.) Why are Jewish women are materialistic and demanding?
Like Paris Hilton's such a peach? Come now.

7.) The Jews run Hollywood.
In truth, Hollywood was much better when the Jews were in charge.

8.) The Jews also own the newspapers.
Another half-truth. If we did, we'd bring back a larger Sunday comics spread and expand the stock market section, too.

9.) The Jews own the banks. I only wish.

10.) Why are Jews more intelligent than everyone else? Allow me to quote Golda Meir who once said, "If the Jews are so smart, then how come we picked the only land in the Middle East that doesn't have any oil?" It does provide food for thought, now doesn't it?

Here's the hate rap sheet on James Wenneker von Brunn. In 1981 he loudly boasted that he'd take Fed Reserve members hostage, a boast he tried to act on. In 1999 he penned a book with the inflammatory, violence inciting title, "Kill the Best Gentiles." In 2003, he sketched a fawning portrait of William Turner, the guru of executed Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh. In between there were long stints spent hobnobbing with a pack of outlandish, violent prone, Neo Nazi groups. von Brunn's punishment for the telephone book thick list of hate threats was to serve a 6 ½ year out of an 11 year sentence in a federal pen. It took two years after he was sentenced before he did the time.

The question then is how could a guy who made absolutely no effort to hide his intent to wreak murder and mayhem on Jews and blacks and had a personal track record of acting out the lunacy run loose for so long? One answer is that von Brunn and the thousands of others that rant, rail, and spew hate in speeches, on websites, in videos and in their fringe, kooky publications are simply exercising their first amendment right; a right that can't be abridged no matter how scary they sound. von Bunn has that right.
The other answer is that even when the von Brunns are known tracked, monitored and surveilled and worse commit hate acts, they often evade full punishment. This has nothing to do with the First Amendment, but rather muddled, confused, and outright lax enforcement and prosecution of hate acts. The FBI and local law enforcement agencies long knew about von Brunn's propensity for violence. But even if he had committed a violent act in his home state of Maryland he still might not have been prosecuted under state and especially federal hate crime statutes.

Federal prosecutors are loath to step on the toes of police and prosecutors in criminal cases no matter how badly the crime is tainted by race, gender or religious hatred. Federal prosecutors flatly say that the hate perpetrators are more likely to be convicted and get stiff sentences in state court. That makes good legal and political sense.
But that's not the only reason for their hands off of the von Brunns. Except in the highest profile cases, they see these prosecutions as no-win cases with little political gain, and the risk of making enemies of local police, DAs, and state officials. The rare time that the feds cracked down on civil rights violence was during the 1960s civil rights battles. The wave of violence then stirred national and international revulsion and forced then President Lyndon Johnson to order more civil rights prosecutions.

The only exceptions to the set in stone rule that prosecutors stay out of state cases occurs when a hate crime triggers a major riot, generates mass protests or attracts major press attention. The Rodney King beating case in Los Angles in 1992 is still the best example of how it took a mass civil upheaval to move the feds to go full blast after a conviction of the police that beat King, and then only after a failed prosecution in state court. The King case is also an example of how criminal cases with clear civil rights abuses become highly politicized and racially divisive.

Hate crimes may be horrific but they are largely seen as common crimes and are treated as such. Few state prosecutors will chance inflaming racial passions and hatreds by slapping a hate crime tag on a case.

There's also the belief that hate crimes are mostly a thing of the past. When they do occur, they are isolated acts committed by a handful of quacks, and unreconstructed bigots, and that state authorities vigorously report and prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes.

When Congress passed the Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990, it compelled the FBI to collect figures on hate violence. However, it did not compel police agencies to report them. Record keeping on hate crimes is still left up to the discretion of local police chiefs and city officials. Many police departments still refuse to report hate crimes, or to label crimes in which gays, Jews, and minorities are targeted because of race, religion, or sexual preference as hate crimes. Still other police departments don't bother compiling them because they regard hate crimes as a politically loaded minefield that can tarnish their image and create even more political friction. The official indifference by many police agencies to hate crimes prevents federal officials, even if they wanted to more aggressively enforce civil rights laws, from accurately gauging the magnitude of civil rights violence.
Civil rights leaders are dumbfounded at the apparent refusal of many federal prosecutors to recognize what are obvious hate acts. When prosecutors, however, try to sort out whether a crime is a hate motivated crime or just plain crime it's anything but obvious. That's just enough space for the von Brunns of America to crawl through and run loose.

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

My condolences go out to the family and friends of Stephen T. Johns, the guard killed at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. Johns, who was black, was killed not only for the color of his skin but for those he chose to associate with. It is a sad state of affairs when a man or a woman gets gunned down over the color of his skin or for his ethnicity or beliefs.

I have some choice words for the gunman in Tuesday's shooting, long-time white supremacist James Von Brunn, 88, but as I am powerless to mete out any punishment, I will have to let G-d or the powers that be deal with him. He must have had such lousy and miserable childhoods that he grew into a lousy and miserable adult who would objectify and destroy another all in the blink of an eye.

Although I am no therapist, I think the solution lies in learning to empathize, learning to feel what another person must be feeling and to put oneself in the other person's place. And this often starts with simple acts when kids are small.

When reading stories to my students, I will often ask them how and what the characters are feeling and what happened to make them feel that way. Then I will ask how they would feel if they were in that situation and what they would do. At best, I hope it is the beginning of empathy for some.

In cases where I know a child has absolutely no home life and no role models, I will often talk about choices and possible consequences for each one he makes. Sometimes it makes a dent, and sometimes it doesn't, but that doesn't mean that the answer is to stop trying.

A while back, I read about a study where a group of teenage boys, who had been sexually harassing girls in their classes, were paired off with teenage girls who had been the victims of this kind of harassment themselves. At one point, they did a role play where the girls whispered suggestive and explicit comments to the boys. In the end, at least some of the boys started to feel genuine remorse for what they had done and a few even broke down and cried.

People who affiliate themselves with superiority movements need something like this in addition to an education and a general life. They also need to know about love. Maybe then they will understand what it feels like to be in the other person's place. Hopefully, this will happen sooner rather than later.

I'll go back to TS's request for "evidence" of Mark Steyn's bigotry.

Before giving specifics, I'll note that Steyn's comments consistently, over time, show a strongly anti-Muslim view that stingily refuses to give Muslim civilization any credit for its past successes. While Obama is trying to tell Muslims that they should re-embrace their own best principles, Steyn says Muslims have no principles to fall back on. Um, that's not a good way to engage them. Even if you believe they should all come to Jesus, I'm sure Diane would agree that getting them all defensive and angry about their tribal identity is not a good way to "share the good news." The mission committee doesn't teach that approach -- I know, I used to chair those kinds of committees in a former life.

As Philip Jenkins has written, people like Steyn demonize Muslims in much the manner that Protestants once demonized Catholics as representing a peril to America a century ago.

Here are the passages I question:

In his Cairo speech, he congratulated Muslims on inventing algebra and quoted approvingly one of the less-bloodcurdling sections of the Quran...

That's what the president did with Islam: He added sugar and sold it...

Rich thought that the president succeeded in his principal task: "Fundamentally, Obama's goal was to tell the Muslim world, 'We respect and value you, your religion and your civilization, and only ask that you don't hate us and murder us in return.'" But those terms are too narrow. You don't have to murder a guy if he preemptively surrenders....

The nonterrorist advance of Islam is a significant challenge to Western notions of liberty and pluralism.

I've complained about Steyn before, notably here with my brother:

This "red-egghead" approach is exemplified by Mark Steyn, a hero of the religious right. "With every passing month," Steyn wrote in a recent column, there are more Muslims and fewer Episcopalians, and the Muslims export their manpower to Europe and other depopulating outposts of the West. It's the intersection of demography and Islamism that makes time a luxury we can't afford."

In his new book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, he escalates his argument that Muslims are breeding fast enough to destroy all civilization within little Mariam's lifetime. Steyn is careful not to prescribe bombings, beatings or final solutions. He leaves that to the fertile imaginations of his rabid following. He has perfected the mixed message sent by America's leaders to Muslims: We will deliver democracy to your doorstep, and we believe that democratic institutions will speedily bring peace and enlightenment to your nations; but we so fear your irredeemable madness that we think your grandchildren will corrupt our own centuries-old democratic institutions and will bring the West to a new Taliban-like state.

If you want to read more unfiltered Steyn, try this, which strikes me as bigoted.

Again, while I write about this urgent effort on the part of Muslims to reclaim the best in their heritage, Steyn argues loudly -- against either evidence or good taste -- that they have nothing good in their heritage. That helps nothing except his own desire to be a rabble-rouser.

Finally, my brother and I concluded our piece with this: "Scratch a conservative, flag-waving intellectual, and under the surface you will see an America-basher -- one who complains that America lacks character and resolve, one who has no confidence in America 's transforming power, one who cannot trust America to defend its principles when they are truly threatened."

And Steyn proves that anew in his latest piece, with these silly words: "A wealthy nation living on the accumulated cultural capital of a glorious past can dodge its rendezvous with fate, but only for a while. That sound you heard in Cairo is the tingy ping of a hollow superpower."

I'm attempting to back away from this topic in the future. I never believed President Bush was a bigot, but I did believe he received fevered counsel from bigots. But I have no interest in giving attention to fading figures like Steyn, because I suspect they are like parasites that feed on attention and will straddle whatever line necessary to get it (which he proves by snidely citing criticisms like mine in his "Reader of the Day" section).

Just my luck. I invite readers David Long and Matt Richmond to lunch and they disappear on me. If you guys are around, shoot me a note at robasghar@gmail.com.

The bad news is that the Iranian prez is bullying his rivals. The good news is that he finally came out against Hitler:

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused his election rivals on Wednesday of adopting smear tactics used by Germany's dictator Adolf Hitler and said they could face jail for insulting him.

This New York Times piece is a fascinating look at an underreported aspect of the Mideast conflict.

When I visited Israel a few years ago, I found myself looking at barren landscapes and musty old buildings and wondering, "You guys are fighting such big wars over this...?"

Meanwhile, you're hearing a lot about how Pakistan is fending off the Taliban in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, but did you know that the area is considered one of the most beautiful places on the planet? Here are some pix, moving from the scenic to the sad.

I find an article like this one to be dangerously hawkish, a form of bigotry dressed up in intellectual camouflage. It seems typical of Mark Steyn's rhetoric, as he fumes about how immigration in Europe is prompting "The End of the World as We Know It." But I'd be curious to hear other views about whether I may be overreacting or bigoted in my own way.

There are days and nights when I could cry myself to sleep because of the cynicism of the world. Following a tough but nuanced speech in Cairo, the hyper-partisan bickering here was both instant and predictable. Republicans called it "blame America first," and part of an "apology tour." Trying to build a bridge to the Muslim World somehow is caricatured as weak. Better, I guess, to have implacable enemies than to tell hard truths about our values and policies.

Obviously, many Jewish groups were troubled by the apparent moral equivalence of the suffering and rights that they heard in talking about Palestinians and Israelis in two successive paragraphs. Not surprisingly, many Arab and Muslim commentators were also unhappy, complaining that it was only words, which while true is not encouraging, given Obama's courage in appearing in an Arab country and speaking some hard truths at a university.

However what drives me to despair are two positions coming out of the Middle East. One is the intentional mistranslation of the speech--the failure of some nations' news services to use our Arabic and French translation and use their own. This allows them to make it say anything they want it. The power to translate is enormous. One case in point is that La Presse of Tunisia twists Obama into condemning not the continued expansion of West Bank settlements, which though controversial, he did. Instead they make him condemn as illegitimate "continued Israeli colonialism." This, to the average reader, has our president calling Israel illegitimate--which he most certainly did not.

Then, in a cheap shot, some fundamentalist Muslims complained that by quoting from the Quran in English, he was desecrating it. Since the Quran only exists in Arabic (as the Torah is only Torah in Hebrew, hand-written on parchment) it is a "lie and blasphemy to pretend that what he said in English is the Holy Quran." This is a truly reprehensible distortion of his intent and of how it was in fact perceived in most of the Muslim World.

There is far too little generosity of spirit. While I do not and will not agree with all his policy positions or strategies, if we agree that we, the Muslim World and the Middle East are in a mess, nearly everyone is going to have to do some things differently from what got us in this mess. Maybe some good will would be a good start.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich backpedaled from his reverse racist slur of Supreme Court designate Sonia Sotomayor as a racist. A defiant Rush Limbaugh didn't. There's a reason. For more than four decades the reverse racist tag has been the most potent weapon in the arsenal of ultra-conservatives and closet bigots to torpedo affirmative action, cower elected officials and judicial appointees into silence or tepid support of civil rights and poverty related issues and court decisions, and deflect attention from the continued political and economic dominance of well-to-do white males. Obama's election did not change the racial power dynamic in America.

There is still only a handful of African-American, Latino or Asian CEOs who run Fortune 500 companies or who sit on their Boards of Directors. The overwhelming majority of top, middle and lower corporate managers are white males. There is only one African-American in the Senate. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund notes that the increase in the number of minorities on the federal bench has been frozen during the Bush years. Minorities still make up a small percentage of state and federal judges. The first Latina on the High Court won't change that. Laws and public policy are still made, shaped, and enforced by white males.

Sotomayor and any minority perceived to be a threat to corporate and political white male dominance will be branded a reverse racist. This is not new.

The bogus term cropped up in the early 1960s during the first surge of black militancy. A CBS special on the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X, Mike Wallace, was labeled "the hate that hate produced." The special played hard on the theme that the Black Muslims with their white man is a devil rhetoric and messianic religious flavored black separatism were the incarnate of racial bigotry. In the next few years, the Black Panthers, Young Lords, Chicano activists, and other militant groups were routinely reviled as reverse Klan, Nazis, and racist nightriders.

The term reverse discrimination seeped into the official lexicon in 1969 when conservatives took the first light swipe at alleged racial favoritism in government contracting programs that mandated hiring goals and timetables for minorities. The term didn't fully resonate at that time. There was still the glow and goodwill from the 1960s civil rights movement. And then President Richard Nixon backed affirmative action programs that included minority hiring and contracting quotas in the trades. The mood abruptly changed in the late 1970s with the first full blown assault on affirmative action. The assault was fueled by the notion that white males were fast losing ground to hordes of unqualified, incompetent blacks, Latinos and women in business, the professions and the trades. Reverse discrimination or reverse racism now became a staple in the public vocabulary. In its Bakke case ruling in 1978 the Supreme Court virtually banned the use of quotas for minorities in hiring and education, under the guise of ending reverse discrimination.

Since then the faintest hint of a tilt toward minorities in a corporate hiring program, or a university hiring or scholarship program has drawn instant howls of reverse discrimination and piles of lawsuits. The chill on affirmative action programs partly worked. Republican and Democratic presidents Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton, vowed to end or modify affirmative action programs in government agencies. Much of the public now firmly believed that minorities were getting unfair advantage in business and the professions, and that this and they were racist.

Limbaugh and conservatives are banking that branding Sotomayor with the racist tag will punch the standard emotional hot buttons before, during and after her confirmation. The after effect is especially important since so much is at stake in how Sotomayor will vote and the opinions she'll write on the likely stream of race tinged cases that the court will be called on to decide.

Pounding Sotomayor as a racist has already paid a small dividend. In private meetings with moderate Democrat and conservative Republican Senators, the judge slightly pulled back from the reference she made to herself as a wise Latina in a 2001 speech. She called it a poor choice of words. This won't be the last mea culpa she'll be required to make for her alleged racism before she's confirmed. She'll be under tremendous pressure to assure Senators that she'll play it strictly by the moderate and conservative playbook on any and all decisions that even remotely touch on race and class issues on the bench.

This is the terrible price that a wise Latina or anyone else tagged as a reverse racist will have to pay. And will continue to pay.

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

The news was bad but not surprising, considering. Anti-Semitism is on the rise. Even though Jewish hate crimes and anti-Semitic incidents have fallen 7 % nationwide, they have risen worldwide and 21% in the fair state of California.

Locally, there has been more vandalism to synagogues, an Orthodox Jewish man was recently beaten up, and Jewish children have been taunted and beaten in Los Angeles schools and in Santa Clarita public schools.

Anti-anything is not good especially when you are a member of that group, but for other ethnic groups it often means an insult here and there or temporarily wounded pride and dignity. For the Jews, it means not only that but that one of us will usually wind up dead or maimed.

I am lucky, though. I was born well after the Holocaust, the Spanish Inquisition and the pogroms in Russia, and I am able to sit behind my computer and type out what I think. If someone paints a swastika on my door, I can declare it a hate crime and go to the police. My forbearers weren't so lucky. They had to grin and bear it or pretend to ignore it or act as if it didn't bother them or that they weren't afraid. At times, they also had to move from place to place or hide.

Motivated by their stories, I developed one of many missions in my time on this planet. I decided to speak for those who couldn't speak for themselves. It has become one of my raison d'etres.

The problem is that anti-Semitism's always going to rear its ugly, old head. The question is what can be done to help stop it? And the answer is constant vigilance, gritted teeth and education.

To that end, here are ten questions and/or comments people sometimes ask about Judaism along with some answers.

1.) Why are Jews so cheap?

We are not cheap. We happen to give more charity than any other ethnic group. Speaking of which, can I write you up for a donation?

2.) What about Bernard Madoff?

Every ethnic group has its apple that fell from the tree. The Germans had Pope John Paul II, who seemed like a basically decent and nice man especially compared to this one, but they also spawned Hitler. What are you going to do? You can't judge the whole barrel by one or two bad apples.

3.) Why do Jews like money?

Outside of hippies, have you ever met anyone who didn't like money? Money is important.

4.) Why do Jews sing when they pray?

Because we are a musical bunch.

5.) Why do Jewish men make good husbands?

Because I said so.

6.) Why are Jewish women are materialistic and demanding?

Like Paris Hilton's such a peach? Come on.

7.) The Jews run Hollywood.

Hollywood was much better when the Jews were in charge.

8.) The Jews own the newspapers, or what's left of them.

If we did, there'd be a lot more comics and an expanded stock market analysis.

9.) The Jews own the banks.

I wish.

10.) Why are the Jews more intelligent than everyone else?

Allow me to quote Golda Meir who once said, "If the Jews are so smart, then how come we picked the only land that doesn't have any oil in the Middle East?" It is something to think about, isn't it?

We've talked a little lately about nuances as they relate to how our arguments are perceived by others.

I'd like to share two blog posts that I think are nicely nuanced, on the things that some of our readers love to spar about. Let's hear their thoughts on this one about Jesus' approach to gay marriage and this one on atheism vs. faith.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia must have been using a strange blend in his hookah when he said that "Israel should give back the land seized 40 years ago" in exchange for peace.

First, let's discuss diction here. The land was not seized. It was won or acquired in a war. Has any historian ever noted England's King George III asking George Washington to give back the Thirteen Original Colonies after the War of Independence? How about Mexico asking the United States to return its gains after the Spanish American War? Though considering how things have been going, it wouldn't have made much of a difference anyway.

The bottom line is that nations do not return land won in a war, and the land is not "seized" as in stolen; it has been won and annexed fair and square.

This is why our current President, who seems like a nice enough fellow but has been operating along the lines of Alice in Wonderland, should not pressure the Israelis into dismantling their settlements because they have the right to annex land won in a war. But it is not the settlements that are bothering the Arabs and much of the free world anyway; it is the fact that there are more than enough Jews to hold a Mah Jong game anywhere. The Jews could set up a homeland in Alaska, and the Arabs would walk, fly and trod there just to say that they are annoying them and are at the root of their problems.

Further down the watering hole, Alice also praised Palestinian Prime Minister, Mahmoud Abbas, for standing fast in unity talks with Hamas, like any rational person would want to stand in unity with an outfit whose chief goals are victimhood, reproduction or munitions.

Let's look at what other presidents would have done. George Washington tried negotiating with the British, but when he realized that they were dead set on their course, he set out along his path and a great nation came to be born. How about Abraham Lincoln? He tried talking to General Davis and Lee, but when they set off along the path of slavery, he'd had enough and fired the first shot on Fort Sumter. The end result, probably had something to do with how Obama became president, but that will be for a later discussion. The bottom line is that there is a time and place for everything. There is a time for talk, for making nice; there is a time for being namby-pamby and a time for making war. And this is it.

Alas, the ever-loving peacenicks at Hamas have managed to tick off more than the Israelis. In an effort to rein them in, the Palestinian police recently raided a compound and bumped off about six of them, and true to form, the terrorist outfit promised "tough and harsh reprisal."

I may have been wrong about things before, but my prediction is that someday one of their air heads will wind up pressing the wrong button and will turn the whole lot of them into fish chum.

The only thing wrong with New York Congressman Charles Rangel's quip that President Obama had better bring his ID to East Harlem is that he limited it to East Harlem. A President Obama in his trademark baseball cap, sometimes hip clothes, and sneakers, sans White House entourage and limo, strolling or driving down a dimly lit night time street in any number of poor black neighborhoods could easily be stopped. He wouldn't have to fit the near textbook profile of a poor, young, black male. He could just as easily be rich, older, a businessman, a professional, star athlete, college professor, or as in the horrific case of NYPD officer Omar Edwards, the police officer gunned down by a white cop.
There have been countless cases where prominent black men have been stopped, frisked, shaken down, and humiliated by police officers, trailed by store clerks, and fumed in anger as taxicabs whizzed by them on busy urban streets. Edwards is hardly the first black cop to be victimized by fellow officers. In recent years, there have been more than a few cases where white cops stopped, harassed, attempted to arrest, even arrested, and shot off duty black cops.

The wishful thought was that Obama's election buried once and for all negative racial typecasting and the perennial threat it posed to the safety and well-being of black males. It did no such thing. Immediately after Obama's election and months before Edwards was shot dead, teams of researchers from several major universities found that many of the old stereotypes about poverty and crime and blacks remain just as frozen in time. The study found that much of the public still perceives those most likely to commit crimes are poor, jobless and black. The study did more than affirm that race and poverty and crime are firmly rammed together in the public mind. It also showed that once the stereotype is planted, it's virtually impossible to root out. That's hardly new either.

In 2003 Penn State University researchers conducted a landmark study on the tie between crime and public perceptions of who is most likely to commit crime. The study found that many whites are likely to associate pictures of blacks with violent crime. This was no surprise given the relentless media depictions of young blacks as dysfunctional, dope peddling, gang bangers and drive by shooters.

The bulging numbers of blacks in America's jails and prisons seem to reinforce the perception that crime and violence in America invariably comes with a young, black male face. And it doesn't much matter how prominent, wealthy, or celebrated the black is. The overkill frenzy feeding on the criminal hijinks of former New York Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress, O.J. Simpson, and the legions of black NFL, NBA stars, Hollywood personalities, and entertainers who run afoul of the law or are poorly behaved, and of course, everyone's favorite stomping boy, the rappers and hip hop artists, further implants the negative image of black males. None of them are hardly poor, downtrodden, ghetto dwelling young black males.

There was, however, a mild surprise in the Penn State study. It found that even when blacks didn't commit a specific crime; whites still misidentified the perpetrator as an African-American.

University researchers were plainly fascinated by this result. Five years later they wanted to see if that stereotype still held sway, even as Obama's political star rose, and legions of whites said that they liked him, and would vote for him, and meant it. Researchers still found public attitudes on crime and race unchanged. The majority of whites still overwhelmingly fingered blacks as the most likely to commit crimes, even when they didn't commit them. That's especially important to say, since the fall back line on racial stereotypes is that to link race and crime is not to stereotype since blacks commit the majority of street crimes.

One implication for this is that Obama's victory was more a personal triumph for him. It did not radically remap racial perceptions, let alone put an end to racial stereotyping. Another is that much of the public still sees crime and poverty through narrow racial lens.
An early newspaper account of the Edward's shooting minced no words. It said that Edwards was mistaken for a thug. The brazen inference was that Edward's clean cut look, police badge, and that he was doing his duty in giving chase to a criminal suspect didn't exempt him from the young black male equals thug standard typecast. Edwards paid the price for that casting. And all Charlie Rangel was trying to say is that the casting could fit any young black who happens to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time, even if he's a president.

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

Diane speaks of compelling proofs of the existence of God. There are indeed some fascinating philosophical points to be made, notably Aquinas' famous contention that the cosmos must have a first cause and first mover, and that God would be the reasonable choice.

Sure, a Western theologian is very comfortable saying, "Okay, God must have come first, that's settled, now let's fight holy wars over theories of salvation." They laugh at questions like, "But who or what created/moved/caused God" because "He was always there, forever, sitting there by himself, until he decided to create stuff and people a few thousand years ago." But they think it's insufficient to say that the Big Bang came first, and/or that it may have been preceded by endless cycles of universes.

Why exactly is one more unreasonable than the other? I wonder if these "proofs" have been rigged in a certain way, to position what I want to believe as the only reasonable thing to believe.

But here's a bigger issue: The Aquinas-type proof involves a narrow set of assumptions that have been challenged in an age of pluralism. An Eastern view, say Buddhist or Taoist, presumes that the universe is an ongoing, endless process. The concept of a first cause is meaningless, because something would have preceded any first cause anyway. (The Taoists even attempt to capture that by sometimes talking about the Tao as the endless Creator of God.)

Diane defends religion from the attacks of David, which is puzzling considering that I'd imagine she considers people from most religions to be hell-bound anyway. But a classic religious view from the East sees the universe, again, as an endless cycle of processes: and in a true Buddhist view, life isn't a good gift from a Primal God, it's a process from which we are to extract ourselves.

For many throughout history and in our pluralistic day, that is more intellectually satisfying, and no more empirically implausible, than the idea that an eternal God only created one cosmos, somewhere between 6,000 and 13.7 billion years ago, and that he intends to wrap up all space and time sometime in the next few generations.

That does bring up another question. Does anybody know what percentage of the human population believes in the monotheistic God whose existence Diane says has been proved convincingly?