Immanent Eschaton 2008 Presidential Election Guide

Does the current crop of conservative Christian candidates confuse you? Well my friend, if its any consolation, you're not alone.

You've heard the pros and cons, the cons and pros of both sides... You've
listened to people you believe in and people you've never heard of, so it's not
surprising that you're confused. But beyond all the words, beyond all the claims
and promises There's actually just One Big Thing on which most people base their
vote for president: the Man: Ike for president, Ike for president, you like Ike, I like Ike, everybody likes Ike. So bring out the banners, beat the drums, we'll take Ike to Washington... Those were the voices of the people speaking about the man they are going to vote for. What is your decision? Who are you going to vote for?

It is in this spirit that we offer the Comprehensive Election Guide for the Unthinking Conservative: follow the masses, as manipulated by the senior staff of immanent eschaton. We will give you the pros and cons and the cons and pros of both sides, as well as the pros of the cons of the pros, and vice versa. (candidates are presented in order of desirability.)

Giuliani: The Pros: 1) he hates weasels. 2) he really hates weasels, and dictators. 3) he will kick out weaseling dictators, and the disturbed weasel lovers who support them. 4) The New York Times Editors hate him more than anyone, even Bush. The Cons: he constantly quotes George Will as having said he ran the most conservative administration in the last fifty years. (This is additionally annoying because what George Will actually said is that he ran the most effective conservative administration.)

McCain: the pros: perceived moderation, electability-the media love him. the cons: perceived moderation, electability-the media love him.

Thompson: the pros: He can beat up the most Democrats. He smokes cigars. He may have suggested that Michael Moore consider a mental institution. He seems to actually have a sense of humor. The cons: that's really it for the pros.

Romney: the pros: His hair allegedly rivals Democratic Hair front runner Edwards; his sense of humor rivals former Vice President Gore's. The resulting mix of humor and hair is too formidable to contemplate. Another pro for Romney is that he cannot be parodied. Some have attempted:

Mr. Romney also extended an olive branch to evangelical Christians
suspicious of his belief in Mormon doctrine, promising to “continue speaking in
vague, inoffensive language about Jesus and the Bible if you’ll agree to do the
same.

But these parodists have always come short of the True Romney:

I believe that every faith I have encountered draws its adherents closer
to God. And in every faith I have come to know, there are features I wish were
in my own: I love the profound ceremony of the Catholic Mass, the
approachability of God in the prayers of the Evangelicals, the tenderness of
spirit among the Pentecostals, the confident independence of the Lutherans, the
ancient traditions of the Jews, unchanged through the ages, and the commitment
to frequent prayer of the Muslims....

There is one fundamental question about which I often am asked. What do I believe about Jesus Christ?
I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind. My church's beliefs about Christ may not all be the same as those of other faiths. Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history. These are not bases for criticism but rather a test of our tolerance."

Which brings us to the last pro: He loves Jesus. The cons: You pick. Also, how much do you really want to have to hear about Mormonism?

Huckabee the pros: He hates Darwinism. He hates rape. The cons: He loves Darwin. He loves rapists. He probably also loves Bush, but hates his foreign policy. He really loves Jesus. UPDATE: Also, what is it about Huckabee that inspires everyone to think up clever puns like "huckaboom", "huckabust" and "huckabasher". If this represents the state of modern conservatism, we are in a very sorry state indeed.

And Hewitt's objectively dumb because I think so

Hugh Hewitt: Now last week, Romney gave a speech... I thought it was objectively a great speech, given who liked it.

Update: It seems Hewitt meant it as a joke, see here.
However, anyone who thinks Romney's speech was that great is still objectively an idiot.

Ferrets Fight Back

A dark episode of former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani's past has come back to haunt himon the campaign trail for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. Giuliani is now paying the price for derogatory comments made about ferrets on his WABC radio show as mayor, on July 23 1999. UPDATE: audio available here

Mayor Giuliani: We're gonna go to David in Oceanside.
David Guthartz: Hello, Mr. Giuliani, we speak again.
Giuliani: Hi, David.
Guthartz: Let me introduce myself again, David Guthartz, executive president of New York Ferrets' Rights Advocacy. Last week when we spoke, you said a very disparaging remark to me, that I should get a life. That was very unprofessional of you. Here we're trying to get something seriously done–
Giuliani: I, I–
Guthartz: Without you talking over me, we're trying to get something very seriously done–
Giuliani: David, you're on my show. I have the right to talk over you.
Guthartz: But here's the thing: We're trying to get an important issue taken care of where the city is violating state law and I asked you last week if you care about the law.
Giuliani: Yes, I do care about the law. I think you have totally and absolutely misinterpreted the law, because there's something deranged about you.
Guthartz: No, there isn't, sir.
Giuliani: The excessive concern that you have for ferrets is something you should examine with a therapist. Not with me.
Guthartz: Don't go insulting me again!
Giuliani: I'm not insulting you. I'm being honest with you. Maybe no one in your life has ever been honest with you.
Guthartz: I happen to be more sane than you.
Giuliani: This conversation is over, David. Thank you. [Mr. Giuliani cuts him off.] There is something really, really, very sad about you. You need help. You need somebody to help you. I know you feel insulted by that, but I'm being honest with you. This excessive concern with little weasels is a sickness. I'm sorry. That's my opinion. You don't have to accept it. There are probably very few people who would be as honest with you about that. But you should go consult a psychologist or a psychiatrist, and have him help you with this excessive concern, how you are devoting your life to weasels. There are people in this city and in this world that need a lot of help. Something has gone wrong with you. Your compulsion about it, your excessive concern with it, is a sign of something wrong in your personality. I do not mean to be insulting. I'm trying to be honest with you and I'm trying to give you advice for your own good. I know you, I know how you operate, I know how many times you called here this week. Three or 4 o'clock in the morning, David, you called here. You have a sickness. I know it's hard for you to accept that, because you hang on to this sickness, and it's your shield, it's your whatever. You know, you gotta go
to someone who understands this a lot better than I do. And I know you're real
angry at me, you're gonna attack me, but actually you're angry at yourself and
you're afraid of what I'm raising with you. And if you don't deal with it, I
don't know what you're gonna do. But you called here excessively all week, and
you called here at 3 o'clock in the morning. And 4 o'clock in the morning. Over
weasels. Over a ferret. So I know this is difficult and tomorrow one of the
newspapers will write how mean I am and how cruel I am and all this other stuff,
but I believe, because my father and mother taught me this, that you should be
honest with people. And I am giving you the benefit of 55 years of experience
having represented hundreds and in some cases thousands of people on either side in the courtroom, having handled insanity defenses and cases. You need help! And please get it! And you don't have the right to call here at three o'clock in the morning, harass the people on my staff, because of your compulsion. So, David, see what you can do to get help. But we can't help you. We don't have the professional expertise to help you. Now we're gonna move on to Richard in the Bronx.

Now United Ferrets International has issued an ad blasting the mayor for his perceived indifference to ferret rights.

[Thou art] like the toad, ugly and venomous

And that's the happy one.

These Kids Are Swift

Quote of the Day

In no area of human behavior does Albert Einstein's definition of insanity – "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" – come so frequently to mind as Middle East peacemaking.--Jonathan Rosenblum

Hezb No Allah II

Arthur C. Brooks:

In a unguarded moment in a recent interview with Britain’s Guardian, Richard Dawkins, Oxford professor and bestselling author of the atheist polemic The God Delusion, regretted that atheists have, he believes, so little political influence in the U.S. — especially compared with the influence of one other religious group: Jews. According to Dawkins, American Jews “more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place."

Dawkins scores a trifecta for European intellectuals: His claim is anti-semitic, slanders religion, and asserts victimhood. Still, it raises what is actually an important empirical question: Do nonbelievers truly have so little political influence? It turns out that the data tell a different story. In American liberal politics, nonbelievers are a very powerful political force indeed.

It will surprise nobody to learn that the American left is much less religious than the rest of the U.S. population. The General Social Survey tells us that in 2004, liberals were less than half as likely as conservatives to attend a house of worship weekly, and nearly three times as likely as conservatives never to attend. Furthermore, the American left is becoming more secular still: While 27 percent of American liberals attended church weekly in 1974, only 16 percent did by 2004. In contrast, the percentage of church-attending conservatives rose over the same period from 38 percent to 46 percent. There are still some religious liberals left in America, but today they are outnumbered by religious conservatives by about four to one...

Further, secularists are by far the most politically active liberals at the grassroots level. In the 2005, the Maxwell Poll on Civic Engagement and Inequality revealed that those who never attend religious services are just 11 percent of the adult population in America. But they are 21 percent of self-described liberals, 27 percent of liberals who contribute money to political causes, and 33 percent of liberals who attend political rallies and events. The bottom line is that the Democratic party — at least at the national level — depends critically on nonbelievers. They have influence over American liberal politics that extends far beyond their actual numbers in the population...

The truth is that secularists have nothing to complain about when it comes to political power. Their representation in American liberal political activity is disproportionately high, it is increasing, and it utterly dominates the political scene in many places. What secularists might legitimately complain about is the fact that liberal political leaders rarely acknowledge their contribution. To my knowledge, for example, Senator Clinton has never thanked the atheist community for what will no doubt prove to be energetic support for her presidential candidacy. Why is this? Nonbelievers might justifiably ask Mrs. Clinton and other Democratic leaders for the credit they truly deserve.

Bush and Gore Meet; Gore Still Unable to Smile

In their first private meeting since the beginning of Bush's presidency, former Vice President Al Gore retained his trademark look of condescension that he has been unable to change for at least the last twelve years. The expression, which conveys a mixture of "I know I'm so much smarter than you" and "I can't believe I'm standing next to this idiot", according to many commetators, may have cost Gore the hotly contested 2000 presidential election. Gore spokespeople were quick to point out that the former vice president's condescension had nothing to do with George W. Bush. "Al was snooty before the election. The election may have made him more bitter, but he was always snooty," one spokesperson who wished to remain anonymous said.

UPDATE: immanent eschaton staff have confirmed that Gore has never smiled. If anything, this picture is probably Gore happy. We for one would therefore like to commend his graciousness in putting on such a good act of exuberance.

best of the hecklers

The Plight of the Haredim

By far, the best article on this subject I have seen. Sympathetic, but not apologetic, and extremely well researched and understanding. From Azure:

In Israel, however, a different model has emerged, according to which a far greater portion of working-age haredi men are engaged in full-time study--as many as two-thirds, according to one survey.¹² Following the rise of Nazism and the destruction of European Jewry in the 1930s and 1940s, a large number of Orthodox Jews came to Israel, including many rabbinical students and rabbis eager to rebuild the world of the yeshivot that had been lost. The most notable of these was R. Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz, better known as the Hazon Ish, who arrived in Palestine in 1933 and was the foremost leader of the haredi community in Israel until his death in 1953; Karelitz led an effort to recast Orthodox life in a way that focused on stringency in observance of Jewish law, isolationism, and, above all, Tora study.¹³ While many similarly minded rabbis immigrated to the United States as well during this period (most notably R. Aharon Kotler, founder of the Lakewood yeshiva in New Jersey), their influence was far more decisive in Israel. One reason was the difference in size: By the end of World War II, the haredi community in the United States was already well-established and institutionally organized; the community in Palestine, on the other hand, was tiny, numbering only a few thousand, and disorganized, giving the immigrant rabbis far greater say in shaping its ideological tenor.

Another difference stemmed from the powerful Zionist ideals that defined the identity of secular Israel. From before the founding of the state, the haredi community has been locked in an ideological battle with Zionism, which its early leaders saw as a direct threat to the haredi way of life. Ya’akov Weinrot, one of Israel’s leading attorneys, who served as one of the Orthodox representatives on the Tal Commission, minces no words in articulating this view of Zionism. “Zionism was never content with gaining national independence,” he writes in his addendum to the commission’s report. “The mainstream expressed a desire to create a new culture, a new identity, of which a central tenet was the need to wipe out Orthodoxy as a precondition to opening new vistas.”¹⁴

This Zionist “threat” was greatest in the early years of the state, when Israel’s small haredi community, ravaged by the Holocaust and competing for the future of its children against the compelling image of the “new Jew” offered by Zionism, saw itself as struggling for survival. R. Binyamin Secharansky, director of the Beit Ya’akov girls’ seminaries in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, recalls the spiritual climate in Israel in the early 1950s: “The haredi public in those days suffered doubly: The great centers of Tora and Hasidism of Europe… had gone up in flames, and those who survived had to rebuild from scratch; moreover, the young state had new ideals and launched new symbols and flags to obscure their uniqueness as Jews.… The image of the tanned sabra, smiling confidently and speaking and acting brashly, whose whole being said youth and strength-this was the image that symbolized the new identity.”¹⁵ Jonathan Rosenblum, a well-known haredi columnist for The Jerusalem Post, describes the sentiment shared by secular and Orthodox Jews alike in the early days of the state: “In the early 1950s, there existed a virtual consensus concerning the future of the haredi community in Israel: Except for a few pockets of the old yishuv in Jerusalem, haredi Judaism would be a historical memory within one generation…. Even within the citadel of the old yishuv in Me’a She’arim, there was not a house in which someone had not been swept up by the Zionist movement, which was viewed as the vanguard of the future.”¹⁶

Nowhere was the threat felt more acutely than with respect to compulsory military service. According to the dominant Zionist vision, the army was meant not only to defend the state against foreign aggression, but also to serve as a central tool in forging a new national identity, through which immigrants from disparate lands would shed their cultural and linguistic baggage and adopt the language and customs of the new Jewish state. This was precisely what the haredi public did not want-and, for the most part, still does not want. Then as now, many haredi parents saw conscription as an attempt by the state to strip their children of the standards of behavior they had worked for years to inculcate. Retired Supreme Court Justice Tzvi Tal, who headed the commission that bears his name, says the haredim “do not want any contact between the yeshiva world and the dangerous-from the religious point of view-army, where people have different values relating to modesty and profane language.”¹⁷ The Post’s Rosenblum concurs: “After guarding their children’s souls like a Ming vase for eighteen years, haredi parents cannot be expected to expose them, at the most vulnerable stage in their lives, to an environment of casual sexual mixing and standards of modesty so at odds with their own.”¹⁸ A Gerrer Hasid who did four months of army service before joining the workforce relates that while he had no difficulty with the physical demands of basic training, he was shocked by the late-night discussions, which focused on women, movies, and sex. “Under no circumstances would I expose my son to a world” like the one he found in the IDF, he says. “I can’t send my son to be under the supervision of [then Defense Minister] Ehud Barak or [IDF Chief of Staff] Shaul Mofaz. Barak doesn’t live my experience and doesn’t know what’s important to me.”¹⁹

In the early days of the state, a settlement was reached between David Ben-Gurion and the leadership of the haredi community, according to which yeshiva students would be exempt from army duty so long as they were engaged in full-time study. Students who declared that “their Tora is their trade” (toratam umnutam) could continue to defer their enlistment indefinitely, but would be prohibited from engaging in activities other than Tora study-including teaching or even volunteer work--without first serving in the army.

Over the years, as the haredi community increased in size and the ideal of full-time Tora study for as long as possible became increasingly accepted, the number of people taking advantage of the deferments rose dramatically. What began as a group of approximately 400 students exempt from army duty at the founding of the state had grown by 1980 to around 10,000, and by 1999 had blossomed into a corps of over 30,000 men who were exempt from service, a number that continues to grow by about one thousand each year.²⁰ These men, dedicated to full-time Tora study, are also bound to it by the threat of immediate conscription should they attempt to enter the workforce. This fact alone constitutes one of the most significant differences between the American and Israeli communities: While an American haredi youth is free to pursue college or vocational training without the worry of being drafted, his Israeli counterpart must remain in yeshiva or face months or years in an army environment that is, in his view, hostile to his way of life. The threat of army service, in the words of Justice Tal, “imprisons” haredim in their yeshivot.²¹

Driven both by ideology and by the fear of army service, the haredi community that has emerged in Israel is characterized by a far more decisive commitment to full-time study of Tora than its American counterpart. According to a study by Boston University economist Eli Berman, 77 percent of haredi men between the ages of 25 and 29 in Israel are studying full-time in yeshiva; even for men aged 41 to 44, this figure remains as high as 46 percent.²² Overall, about two-thirds of working-age haredi men in Israel are full-time yeshiva students.²³

The exclusive nature of the ideal of Tora study is felt especially strongly among those haredim who end up pursuing careers outside the yeshiva. “Every father wants his son to grow up and become a great Tora scholar,” notes Moti Green, who left the yeshiva at 34 to become the first haredi attorney to clerk in the Israeli Supreme Court. “Even though I’ve succeeded as a lawyer, I’ve failed in terms of my ultimate goals in Tora.” Reflecting the extent to which the haredi world has succeeded in driving home the message of “Tora learning for all,” Green concludes: “This is my tragedy… to go from a spiritual life to a life of work is a giant waste.”²⁴

This attitude is reflected in the haredi educational system in Israel, which prepares young men for a life of Tora study, with a far smaller emphasis on vocational training. From the age of three, when boys are sent to heder to taste cakes baked in the shape of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and coated with honey to symbolize the sweetness of Tora, until 13, when they graduate from talmud tora (which parallels elementary and middle school), study of subjects such as English, math, and science is a barely tolerated necessity. “I was 12 the last time I had secular studies, and that was for 45 minutes a day,” recalls Yisrael. “We used to say, ‘What do we need this for? Are we going to be grocery store owners? We’re going to be Tora scholars!’”²⁵ Yeshiva ketana, the haredi equivalent of high school, offers no secular studies whatsoever; boys as young as 14 are expected to study Talmud ten hours or more a day.²⁶ Students move on at age 17 or 18 to yeshiva gevoha, the equivalent of talmudic college, and then, after marriage at 20 or 21, to kollel, where they continue as long as possible; for some it is a lifetime, for many others it is until their early forties and beyond.

Most girls attend Beit Ya’akov schools, where they are taught that nothing is more important than the study of Tora, and that marrying and supporting a scholar-in-the-making is the most noble mission of all-even if it means a life of poverty.²⁷ The success of the Beit Ya’akov system in inculcating this message is largely responsible for the phenomenal growth of the yeshivot. Some sixty years ago in Europe, R. Haim Ozer Grodzinski, one of the leading figures of Orthodox Jewry through the start of World War II, remarked that whenever he saw an unattractive or disabled girl, he would stand in her honor, “for she is likely to become the wife of a Tora scholar.”²⁸ In those days, most of the women who would consider marrying yeshiva students were those with no other option. Today, in the words of a psychologist in Jerusalem who works with haredi women, “Grade A marries Grade A”--the top girls want the top boys, which means someone who will sit and learn for many years.²⁹ Some 30,000 young women attend Beit Ya’akov high school and seminary, a six-year program that offers job training, mostly as teachers, and imparts a reverence for Tora and those who study it.

The rabbis who crafted this model were not under the illusion that every man is cut out for a lifetime of learning, or that every woman can bear and raise an average of seven or eight children while being the sole breadwinner in her family. But they nonetheless encouraged young men who had little chance of becoming serious Tora scholars to pursue an education that left them few opportunities to succeed in anything else, because this approach was seen as the only way to rebuild the Tora world after the devastation of the Holocaust. Only by creating a single track, it was believed, would the exceptional scholars remain in yeshiva long enough to realize their potential. And only by demanding compliance with a rigid model of what a Jew should be could the less-than-stellar scholar be protected from the lures of secular society.

The result of all this is a pattern of haredi life in Israel that differs markedly from the way religious Jews have ever lived, both in Europe before the war and in America today. As Justice Tal points out, even the great yeshivot of Lithuania never had more than a few hundred students--as compared to the nearly 4,000 students who are now learning at the Mir yeshiva in Jerusalem or the 1,500 at the Ponavez yeshiva in Bnei Brak. “This is how it always was,” Tal says. “There was never a situation when a boy learned his whole life. Even Volozhin, the flagship of the yeshiva world, only had four hundred students at its peak…. The situation in Israel is an anomaly.”³⁰

In recent years, however, it has become increasingly clear that the Israeli model cannot sustain itself indefinitely. The foremost problem is economic, resulting from the rapid growth in the size of the learning community. In the past two decades, as the ideology of lifelong, full-time Tora study has taken a firmer hold, the percentage of haredi men over the age of 25 choosing to study in kollel rather than earn a living has increased dramatically-from 41 percent in 1980 to 60 percent in 1996, according to one study.³¹ At the same time, haredi families are growing larger, and therefore the financial burdens are increasing: In 1980, the average haredi woman would bear 6.5 children in her lifetime; by 1995 that number had risen to 7.6, a 17-percent increase. This means that the number of children growing up in conditions of poverty-and the corresponding economic burden on Israeli society-is far higher than in the past. According to Berman, the portion of Israeli children overall whose fathers are studying in yeshiva full-time has more than doubled, from 2.7 percent in 1980 to 5.9 percent in 1996; according to one estimate, that number could exceed 10 percent by the year 2006.³²

These families tend to live in conditions of significant poverty and significant dependence. According to Berman, the average haredi family in which the father does not work has a total annual income of about $14,000, less than half that of the average two-parent family in Israel, while supporting 4.5 children, as opposed to the nationwide average of 2.1.³³ Of this income, only 18 percent is earned, almost entirely from the wife’s efforts, while the rest comes from a variety of government stipends and transfer payments. As a result, Jerusalem and Bnei Brak, cities with large haredi populations, consistently top the poverty figures released each year by the National Insurance Institute.³⁴ According to a recent study by the economist Momi Dahan of the Bank of Israel, over 50 percent of haredi families in Jerusalem lived below the poverty line in 1995.³⁵

there is much much more...

Why Bush loves- Orthodox Jews.

just found this article from 2004 New Republic (reprinted on the Jewish World Review--see if you can recognize the guy sitting behind Rick Santorum)

Dateline: NEW YORK, NEW YORK
John Kerry may or may not know what agita is. (It's an Italian word for indigestion appropriated by American Jews of my grandparents' generation.) But Neal Turk could give it to him. Turk is the head of Beth Israel, an Orthodox Jewish congregation of some 250 families in Miami Beach. He's visiting New York this week for two reasons. First, to drop in on his son at Yeshiva University in New York City; and second, to attend a Bush-Cheney campaign briefing for Orthodox Jews. When I approach Turk after the event, he explains that much of his congregation supported Al Gore and Joe Lieberman in 2000. Lieberman even attended services at his synagogue during the campaign. But Turk says most members are voting Republican this time around. "It's not a hard decision at all," he says. "I think that President Bush has so convinced us all of his support for Israel."
One shouldn't overstate the significance of people like Turk. "Jews remain one of most loyal constituencies," says one Kerry adviser. "It makes many uncomfortable--if not downright scared--to know that this administration is so ideologically driven on so many issues." He's right. A recent poll of Jewish Americans found that 75 percent prefer Kerry, pretty much the same number that favored Gore. Bush campaign officials protest that the poll was partisan--it was sponsored by a Democratic organization--and skewed because it was conducted during the Democratic convention. But even strategists close to the administration concede it's unlikely Bush will perform more than five or ten points better than the poll indicates. "Seventy to seventy-five percent of the Jewish vote is off the table to Bush," admits one.
The issue, these strategists claim, is not whether Bush wins 30 percent of the national Jewish vote. It's whether he picks off five or ten percentage points in key swing states like Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania--states where Jews tilted strongly toward Gore and Lieberman in 2000 and where a few thousand votes could mean the difference between a second term and a one-way ticket to Crawford. The Bush campaign--run by Ken Mehlman. who grew up in a kosher household--is acutely aware of this. And the Jewish outreach shows it: It is vastly more sophisticated than anything the Republicans attempted in 2000 or 1996--and in some ways more sophisticated than anything the Democrats are doing this year. "My conversations with [the Kerry people] are much more in broad terms, about broad policy issues, broad message," says an official from a large Jewish organization. "The Bush folks have their playbook. They're running plays. They want to know... in this city, who do you recommend?" If people like Neal Turk are any indication, those plays may be working.
The obvious place for Republicans to troll for Jewish votes is the Orthodox community. Orthodox Jews are more comfortable with Republican positions on abortion and gay marriage than their Conservative, Reform, and unaffiliated Jewish counterparts. They are sympathetic to Republican programs like faith-based initiatives and school choice. (Vouchers could significantly benefit Orthodox Jews, who often send their children to private religious schools.) And they are more hawkish than other Jews on Israel. Their numbers, moreover, aren't trivial. Estimates for South Florida's Orthodox Jewish population exceed 50,000 (out of a state population typically estimated at 750,000 Jews). The Cleveland area boasts several thousand Orthodox Jews; Philadelphia and Detroit have large Orthodox populations of their own. Bush could easily win more than 50 percent of the vote in these communities, says Larry Grossman, co-editor of the American Jewish Yearbook at the American Jewish Committee. That would likely be a significant improvement from 2000, when, according to one estimate, 60 percent of Orthodox Jews voted for Gore. This is apparently the motivation behind a trip by Republican Senators Rick Santorum and Norm Coleman (himself a Jew) to the largely Orthodox Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn on the second day of the convention. Santorum and Coleman are inside consulting with three prominent rabbis when I arrive at the Joseph Tanenbaum Torah Center. It's a private meeting that's closed to the press, so it's unlikely I'll be admitted even if I can find the right room. But it doesn't matter anyway. A scrum of teenage seminary students block the entrance, each dressed in traditional black pants, white shirts, and velvet skullcaps. Their de facto leader, a short, broad-shouldered blonde whom the others refer to as the "student mayor," demands to know what I'm doing here. Saying I'm a journalist is apparently the wrong answer because, before long, I'm in a raging political debate. Actually, "debate" is a stretch. The kids I'm talking to have no idea who Santorum is. But they know what they think of Bush and Kerry. "Bush is a man," the student mayor sums it up for me, whereas Kerry is a liberal. "And religious Jews don't go with liberals."
The political benefit of an event targeted at haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, Jews in New York is not immediately obvious. After all, New York is a blue state, and winning every Brooklyn Orthodox vote isn't going to dent the Democratic tally here. But Jeff Ballabon, a 41-year-old Orthodox Jew and Bush Pioneer who helped organize the Brooklyn trip and the earlier briefing, argues that the events will resonate outside New York because haredim in different parts of the country are tightly connected. "They all read the same national papers," says Ballabon. "And ninety-five percent of them are published in New York. ... The Orthodox press for many is the primary source of news." The logic applies to non-haredi, modern Orthodox Jews as well. At the Bush campaign press briefing earlier in the day, Tevi Troy, an Orthodox Jewish campaign official, emphasizes that the assembled leaders, a mixture of haredi and modern Orthodox Jews, are "plugged into other cities"--"you know, people in Detroit, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Cleveland." He encourages them to "talk to your friends in other cities and tell them what the president is about."
With a hawkish evangelical in the White House and no Lieberman on the Democratic ticket, Bush's task when it comes to Orthodox Jews is probably less a matter of changing minds than energizing the vote. Hence the much-hyped appearance at Madison Square Garden Tuesday evening of Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis, a renowned figure in the Orthodox community and perhaps the first person ever to wear a sheitel (the wig worn by Orthodox women) on a convention stage.
The true swing voters, by contrast, are those secular and moderately religious Jews for whom Israel and the war on terrorism trump other issues, such as abortion. The Bush campaign believes it can make gains here as well. "The natural inroads are Jews in areas with Republican congressmen," says a Republican strategist. "The work that's going to be done is among the Reform, Conservative, and unaffiliated Jews who identify Israel as one of their top three issues."
The public face of this effort is Virginia Representative Eric Cantor, the chief deputy majority whip in the House of Representatives and the only Jewish Republican in the House. Cantor is a mild-mannered, third-generation Richmonder with a boyish grin and an easy Southern lilt. But, when he takes the microphone at a Sunday brunch at the Plaza Hotel, where American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) members dominate the crowd, his rhetoric verges on the apocalyptic. "The Jewish people have a sometimes painful and tragic history," he says. "It gives us an understanding of the devastation that can be wrought by a savage ideology." At an event the following afternoon, he tells the crowd, "We aren't negotiating with the terrorists, and neither should Israel." Cantor tells me this is a message he's been taking to swing states like Ohio, Florida, and Arizona "several weekends a month."
It's a message the people who showed up at the Plaza are receptive to. Many are secular Jews who were Democrats before September 11. A stocky middle-aged man from Florida who looks like a slightly older version of Al Franken glances conspiratorially over his shoulder as he confides to me, "I think there are a lot of Jewish Democrats, including me, that support the president. ... He understands the difference between good and evil." Some of these people have probably been voting Republican for years and were just too embarrassed to admit it. September 11 and the Bush administration's support of Israel gave them a powerful public rationale. Still, there does appear to be a real shift underway, if only a small one. Jay Stein, chairman of the clothing outlet Stein Mart and previously one of the largest donors to Al Gore, told me, ''After the experience of 9/11, in my view, a different criterion had to be placed on who's going to be president. ... If America is not safe, very little else matters. ... All these wonderful democratic values matter less if we're not secure in our own country."
The underbelly of the Bush campaign's pitch to these voters is the idea that, even if John Kerry, who gets a stellar rating from AIPAC, is a reliable supporter of Israel, and even if he says he'd prosecute the war on terrorism aggressively, there are structural forces within the Democratic Party that make a Kerry administration dangerous. At just about every Jewish-themed event I attended this week--and there were multiple events each day--someone has drawn attention to the rise of the antiwar, anti-Israel left within the Democratic Party. Usually, the conversation begins with Michael Moore, who has left a long trail of anti-Israel comments, continues on to MoveOn.org and former supporters of Howard Dean, and ends with the observation that, in recent years, it has been the far left of the Democratic Party, not the far right of the Republican Party, that has been AWOL on votes in Congress regarding Israel. "That's going to be a major theme going into the stretch run," says one Republican strategist. "The point is, who do you surround yourself with? ... [With the Kerry] campaign, the focus is on Michael Moore, Jimmy Carter." One Jewish Republican close to the White House, who occasionally serves as a Bush campaign surrogate, told me he makes this pitch explicitly. "Even if Kerry means everything he says about Israel," he tells Jewish audiences, "the question is whether his constituency--today's Democratic Party--would really let him go there."
There are signs this strategy is working. A leader of a major Jewish organization told me, "After the Democratic convention, they may well have driven Jews into the Republican camp. ... I was there. I saw the reaction ... to seeing the whole thing revolve around Michael Moore." Others attribute the increasing willingness of young Jews to vote Republican--Republican pollster Frank Luntz has data suggesting that only 60 percent of Jews under 35 vote Democratic--to a reaction against campus anti-Israel and antiwar activism.
Ironically, though, the Bushies may be making their greatest inroads among a group of Jews who aren't within 5,000 miles of Madison Square Garden. Estimates suggest there are about 200,000 American citizens living in Israel, making it the fifth-largest source of American expatriates in the world. Over 100,000 are eligible to vote. Americans in Israel--and Israelis in general--tend to be favorably disposed to Bush thanks to his close relationship with Ariel Sharon. A Tel Aviv University poll conducted in early August found that Israelis prefer Bush to Kerry by a 49-18 margin. So a 527 organization called Republicans Abroad Israel has identified several thousand expats eligible to vote in each of the major swing states (about 25,000 in all) and is frantically trying to register them before a self-imposed deadline arrives in two weeks. Bush may not be playing well in Peoria. But, this year, he might gladly exchange Peoria for Tel Aviv.
~~~~~~~~
By Noam Scheiber

(as a side note, the New Republic has stopped being interesting ever since they got rid of Peter Beinart-another orthodox Jew-as their editor.)

Jonathan Rosenblum Attacks the Charedim!

jonathan rosenblum comments about a split in the orthodox world:

On one side, there exists a small minority that does not factor in the
reactions of its fellow Jews before acting. That group has for so long viewed
itself as a besieged minority that it has lost the sense of connection to the
larger Jewish people. The consequences of its members’ actions on the general
perception of the Torah and Torah-observant Jews are of little concern.
Their focus is instead on the protection of their turf from alien
intrusions.

sound familiar? although Rosenblum is writing about the Neturei Karta, perhaps he is sending a hidden message as well. (this may be a common theme in his writing, דוק ותשכח.) alternatively, he is thoroughly unfamiliar with irony.

The Closest Religion to Judaism (Chabad's number four)

from the (probably to be censored) comments on Avi Shafran's recent Cross-Currents post:

“and that the Third Holy Temple will be built by the hand of not man but G-d”
I guess charedim have information that the rambam [melakhim 11:1] is wrong. it is also ironic how the “haredi perspective” that it “doesn’t make any inherent difference what temporal flag flies above the hewn stones of Jerusalem’s walls” is against halakha; besides for the ramban who forbids abandoning portions of eretz yisrael to the nations, giving “back” Jerusalem would also violate “lo tichanem”. In the past, charedim at least claimed that giving back land was permissible for security. Now I guess that claim is too patently absurd, so they have just dropped this portion of halakha entirely. If this is the case, I applaud their honesty.

the truth is there is actually almost no honesty in their position; they oppose giving back land which charedim like, although supposedly they do not take positions on security related issues. Yet if the rationale is that pikuach nefesh overrides all else, it hardly seems that the emotional attachment to Jerusalem should trump pikuach nefesh. This intellectual thistle-patch, however, is the unfortunate lot of agudah spokesmen.

UPDATE: commentor Nachum on hirhurim suggests that Shafran is suffering from acute cognitive dissonance, and that instead of making fun of him, we should feel bad for him.

Modern Orthodox Take Over the United States Government

Attorney General Robert Mukasey's wife was the head of school at Ramaz. Now Bush appoints Ramaz-grad Tevi Troy as Deputy Sec. of Health and Human Services. Jonah Goldberg writes:

Tevi is my oldest friend in Washington. I replaced him at the American Enterprise Institute. It's kind of wild to think that he's running the largest civilian bureaucracy in America, with 1 in 4 tax dollars cycling through his shop. I remember the days we spent our time debating DC vs. Marvel and pretending we understood Leo Strauss. Anyway it was very cool to watch, and a bit weird. The Commissioned Corps of the Public Health service provided an amazing amount of pomp and circumstance. Who knew Tevi gets his own flag? Anyway, it was deeply gratifying to see Tevi prosper. Being a committed conservative at a bureaucracy like HHS is ultimately a thankless effort at damage control, I suspect. But I can't think of someone better suited to make the best of his task.

This is the same Tevi Troy who wrote back in 2001:

A WOMAN I RECENTLY MET at a Bat Mitzvah asked me what I do for a living. Experience told me what was coming, so I kept my answer generic: I work in politics. She followed up, pressing until she got the answer she wanted--or, more accurately, did not want: I work for Senator John Ashcroft, Republican of Missouri. I'm used to fellow Jews disliking my boss, but her answer still took me by surprise: "I'm speechless."

WITH HIS NOMINATION TO BE GEORGE W. Bush's attorney general, Ashcroft's image among my co-religionists seems to have deteriorated even further. The National Council of Jewish Women opposes his appointment. Jewish senators like Barbara Boxer and Charles Schumer have expressed their displeasure. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said this week, "We question whether his religious views will have an impact on his role as attorney general." I'm beginning to wonder whether I'll ever be able to safely cruise Bat Mitzvah buffet tables again.

CRITICS IMPLY THAT ASHCROFT, because of his strong Christian beliefs, is intolerant of Jews. Actually, he's more than tolerant; he's downright philo-Semitic. Ashcroft was born to a gentile family in a predominantly Jewish Chicago neighborhood. His mother served as a Shabbos goy, turning ovens on and off as needed (a practice many Jews found charming when practiced by a young Colin Powell-but then Powell is African American and pro-choice). Ashcroft's father even took a mezuzah with the family when they moved from Chicago to Springfield, Missouri, where he kept it affixed to his doorpost until his death, in 1995. Ashcroft, I'd wager, knows more about Judaism than half the Jewish members of the Senate.

WHEN I FIRST TOLD ASHCROFT THAT, as an observant Jew, I would not be able to work on Saturdays and certain holidays, it was a point in my favor, not a strike against me. Once, I stood up during a Friday afternoon briefing and said I needed to leave. He asked me where I was going, as it is unusual for staffers to walk out of briefings. I told him that the sun was setting, and he immediately understood and ordered me to hurry along.

ASHCROFT, HIS DETRACTORS suggest, is a religious fanatic, because his religion dictates that he cannot smoke, gamble, drink, curse, or dance. But it may be precisely because he is scorned as a "fanatic" that he has been so tolerant of my own somewhat odd religious practices. After all, when I go to weddings, I won't participate in mixed dancing. I fast half a dozen times a year, and I unscrew the lightbulb in my refrigerator every Friday so I won't turn on the light on the Sabbath. I'm every bit the "fanatic" that he is-maybe more so.

WHAT MOST LIBERALS AND MOST Jews don't understand about people like Ashcroft is that their deep respect for religious faith genuinely transcends sectarian divides. And that often makes it easier for me, as a religious Jew, to work for them than for Jews or Christians who don't take any religion seriously as a force in people's lives. In my experience, when you tell a nonobservant Jewish boss you need time off for Shavuot, there is often a moment of discomfort, as if he thinks you are acting superior for taking off what many Jews see as a minor holiday. When you tell an observant gentile, he may ask you what the holiday is and then say he is happy that you are observing Pentecost.

AS SENATOR, ASHCROFT HELD A voluntary Bible study in his office every morning. I didn't go and suffered no adverse consequences. But the office's other Orthodox Jewish staffer--Ashcroft may well have employed more Orthodox Jews than any other senator--attended regularly. And every other attendee, including the senator, was impressed by this staffer's knowledge and understanding of the Old Testament. Whenever staffers ate with the senator, someone began the meal with a prayer. While the prayers were of the Christian extemporized variety--as opposed to the Jewish approach of reciting specific blessings for specific foods--they were ecumenical in content. In fact, Ashcroft pointedly insisted that prayers not mention Jesus, in order to be inclusive of all the religions in the office.

WFB's latest

those who know what WFB really stands for won't be surprised by the title. And the photograph on the cover is excellent.

American Conservatism

Encyclopedia

This blog's reading level:

Cash Advance Loans

(hat tip: The WWS:

The Campaign Standard (and the Corner)

(Hillary spot:

Cash Advance Loans

esterday All my troubles seemed so far away Now it looks as though they're here to stay ...

Huffington Post:

Point taken. But could you set the record straight about the tip? Your manager says they left something but you contend it never happened.
If your phone is ringing from six in the morning till four in the afternoon and customers are saying what's wrong, the telephone lines are down, and it's because reporters are trying to get through, you say whatever you have to say [to get them to go away]. I don't know if they left a $100 tip or not but I haven't seen it yet. And none of the other waitresses have said they got the tip. [Editor's Note: after the tip controversy became a national story, the Clinton campaign returned to the restaurant and left $20].

Sen. Clinton talked about you - following this incident - in some of her speeches about women earning minimum wage and you seemed upset about it.
To all the politicians, if you talk to somebody and maybe their life interests you, don't just go down the road then and use them as part of your speech to get votes. I was never even asked that day if I'm a Democrat or a Republican or whatever. I was never asked whom I was behind. And then to go down and be called up that night [in a speech by Clinton], was I angry about it? Yes I was. Don't get me wrong they called me a few days later to ask if they could use me in the speech. And they sent me a release form, but they were already using me. So what the hell, I signed it.

How has this whole saga affected you and the restaurant?
There were phone calls going off the wall. It disrupted business and hurt it in some ways. I'm thankful I still have a job there and thank them very much for that. I'm sure it took money away from them. Out of my life, from day one of meeting her it has been turned upside down and not in a good way.

Does this change the way you are approaching the presidential election?
I've been an independent all my life. My mom was a Democrat and my father a Republican. I just sat back and watched them argue and stayed in the middle. But I'm not going to vote for Hillary. That is a definite. No one could pay me enough money. My opinion of her has changed drastically. The more I read and find out about her it changes more and more to the negative. I don't believe she can help out the working women of this world because I don't believe she gets it.

andrew sullivan

And what's with this weird $20 pay-off to Esterday? If they'd left $100, and knew it had been shared by the wait-staff, why would they need to add $20? Esterday says it was completely improbable that her fellow servers would have received a $100 tip and not shared it with her. I don't know what to believe. I hope someone interviews the fellow servers and gets to the real bottom of this. Yes: it matters. We need to get the name of the staffer who allegedly left the $100 in cash. We need a name of the person who accepted that $100. It wasn't Crawford, because surely he would have immediately told reporters that he had gotten $100 in cash for the wait-staff. It's not something you forget. So who gave it and who received it? Let's find out, shall we?

Why? It's an absolutely trivial story - but its triviality is what's telling.

It is simply unsurprising that a story like this pops up with the Clinton machine - especially that quintessential Clinton touch of the ready $20 pressed into Esterday's hand the day after the story. A classic bribe to keep quiet perhaps? The kind of petty, cheesy sleaze that Clinton engaged in for decades, as he wove his way through every skirt in Arkansas and beyond.

I covered the Clintons for eight years. The one thing I learned about them is that they lie. It's reflexive to them; after decades of the lying that tends to infect the households of addicts, they don't have a normal person's understanding of truth and falsehood. They have an average sociopath's understanding of truth and falsehood. They lie about big things; they lie about small things; and they lie about things that are so trivial you can't believe anyone would bother lying about them. But the Clintons do. They did for eight years. They put the entire country through a trauma because they have no sense of what's true and false any more. Living in a relationship where lying has been integrated into its very essence will do that. They can't help it. Lying is their entropic state of being - big lies, small lies, and everything in between.

You can't trust a word from them. If that's what you want in a war leader, go ahead and vote for her.

Invention of Millenium

Hundred Hillary March

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Lamest Campaign Idea of 2007

I know I should take this in the spirit of Halloween, and chuckle with mirth upon hearing the wacky fun proposed by those crazy kids on the Dodd campaign, but... I just can't. And instead, I'm looking for some way to un-read the epic-level lameness they have offered (hat tip, Influence Peddler).

Chris Dodd did lay out step-by-step instructions today for kids to dress up like him in hopes of bagging lots of candy:

• Use coloring to turn your white (representing the Democratic presidential candidate's 26 years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee).
• Carry a copy of the Constitution (demonstrating Dodd's vow to restore what he calls the Bush administrations assaults on civil liberties).
• Wield a folder of Dodd's campaign proposals (showing his "bold ideas" for a corporate carbon tax, free community college, and a comprehensive national service plan)

"Every year, parents and their children struggle to find that perfect Halloween costume," Dodd spokesman Bryan DeAngelis said in a statement. "We wanted to do our part to help by providing them with the option of going as the one candidate who has the proven leadership, record of results, and bold ideas that we need in our next president — Chris Dodd."

Somehow I suspect trick-or-treating in this costume would go something like this:

Suburban Resident Answering Door: Who are you supposed to be?

Child: I'm Senator Chris Dodd!

(long pause)

Suburban Eesident Answering Door: Who?

Child: Look, this is my white hair, representing my 26 years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee! And this is my copy of the Constitution, demonstrating my vow to restore what I call the Bush administrations assaults on civil liberties! And this is my folder of my campaign proposals, showing my "bold ideas" for a corporate carbon tax, free community college, and a comprehensive national service plan!

(long pause)

Suburban Resident Answering Door: I'm calling Child Protective Services.

I wonder if Giuliani will start quoting this, instead of constantly just saying that George Will said something about his conservative governance:

Giuliani has echoed the language of economic libertarianism with more
frankness, and less pretense of compassion, than any recent Republican
presidential candidate

it is intended as an insult, but hey.

Rebbe Reichman

I remember watching the 2001 World Series (against the Diamondbacks) in Morg Lounge. Amongst all the students sat Rabbi Heshy Reichman on the edge of his seat. When Tino Martinez hit his home run with 2 outs in the ninth to tie up game 4, Rabbi Reichman got everyone there to start dancing around in a circle, singing "ki va moed". When the exact thing happened the next night (game 5-Scott Brosius tying the game in the ninth), there was more dancing. Only the incredible-ness of the event made the dancing that much more leibadik.

interesting machloket at tnr:

"I don't quite understand Ross Douthat's take on Hillary Clinton and the Democratic field. He writes:

As I've probably said before, Hillary may not be the best choice for the Democrats, but she's definitely the safest; I think nominating her more or less guarantees the party 48 percent of the vote, since she's sufficiently tested and savvy and all the rest of it to make a Dukakis or Dole-style wipeout almost completely unimaginable. And in a year when things will (probably) be going the Democrats' way anyway, there's a lot to be said for nominating a known quantity and assuming that, in spite of what Jonah rightly calls the "irreducible core" of anti-Hillary sentiment, the political landscape alone will ensure that her guaranteed 48 percent rises to 51-53 percent by November '08. Whereas Obama and to a lesser extent Edwards both have a higher ceiling, but also a much lower floor, since neither has been through the fire already the way Hillary has (indeed, Obama has never run against significant GOP opposition of any kind), and either one could flame out disastrously in the heat of a general-election campaign.

Remember, John Kerry received 48% of the vote; it's extremely unlikely any Democrat is going to do worse than that next year. Moreover, it seems to me like you could just as easily make the opposite case: Hillary's "ceiling" is just what is so worrying about her. Because the senator is so polarizing, it's likely that some of the numerous advantages the Dems have in 2008 will be subsumed by personal animosity. Why not choose someone like Obama or Edwards, who both have greater upside potential, and are assured of being competitive because of the climate?

--Isaac Chotiner

(immanent eschaton is inclined towards the first approach, וצ"ע)

suggest your own caption

in case you were wondering what has become of the Rush Limbaugh scandal, click here.
UPDATE to previous post: it seems ann coulter's comments were taken out of context too. link

the reason ann coulter's comments were ever noteworthy

"What we seem to have forgotten is how unique the circumstances were that made possible the establishment of the American compact on religion and politics. Perhaps now is the time to restore the much needed concept of American exceptionalism and remind ourselves of some basic facts. The most important one that set our experience apart from that of Europe was the absence of a strong Roman Catholic Church as a redoubt of intellectual and political opposition to the liberal-democratic ideas hatched by the Enlightenment – and thus also, the absence of a radical, atheist Enlightenment convinced that l’infâme must be écrasé. For over two centuries France, Italy, and Spain were rent by what can only be called existential struggles over the legitimacy of Catholic political theology and the revolutionary heritage of 1789. (Though the term “liberalism” is of Spanish coinage, as a political force it was weak in the whole of Catholic Europe until after the Second World War.) Neither side in this epic struggle was remotely interested in “toleration”; they wanted victory.
"Looking beyond Europe, we note other things missing from the American landscape, quite literally. For example, there were no religious shrines to fight over, no holy cities, no temples, no sacred burial grounds (except those of the Native Americans, which were shamefully ignored). There also was a complete absence of what we would today call diversity: America was racially and culturally homogeneous in the early years of the republic, even if there were differences – in retrospect, incredibly minor – in Protestant affiliation. Yes, there were a few Catholics and Jews among the early immigrants, but the tone was set by Protestants of dissenting tendencies from the British Isles. The theological differences among them were swamped by the fact that everyone spoke the same language, cooked the same food, and looked to a shared history of persecution and emigration. It was a homogeneous country, and what comes with homogeneity, along with some troubling things, is trust...

"Except for Joseph Smith in his last days and a few other colorful exceptions, no serious American religious thinker ever developed a full-blown theology of government throwing the basic legitimacy of American democracy into question. It is something of a miracle. But whatever its source, it is exceptional and we need to recognize its consequences. Though the long tradition of Christian political theology eventually died in twentieth-century Europe, memory of it is still strong and laced with fear. But the American founding took place as a self-conscious break with Europe’s traditional political theologies and so memory of the world we left behind is somewhat vague. We were born, so to speak, on the other shore.
So successful has our passage been to this other shore that it is sometimes difficult to remind Americans that political theology is the primordial form of political thought. Virtually every civilization known to us began with an image of itself as set within a divine nexus of God, man, and world, and based its understanding of legitimate authority on that theological picture. This is true of all the civilizations of the ancient Near East, and of many in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Political theology seems to be the default condition of civilizations as they try to articulate how their political order relates to the natural order, and how both stand under a divine order. It is a rational construct with its own concepts and terms, and a long history of intellectual debates that are still alive for those who believe. In it, arguments about authority and legitimacy, or rights and duties, travel up and down a ladder connecting human reasons to divine ones. Making those connections and developing a comprehensive account of God, man, and world simply is what it is to think politically for political theologians.

Freakin' Maniac Breaking News

the Freakin' Maniac, or something like that, is announcing that due to the high annoyingness of his blog, or something like that, he will no longer be posting. (we have an understanding that a majority of the "annoying" votes were actually cast by immanent eschaton staff, which just shows again the immense influence immanent eschaton wields.)
in a related note, the aforementioned maniac also reveals that one of the leaders of the dark forces (with out giving too much away, his last name rhymes with shmize l. man) will be publishing a book on why he really should be leader of the moetzes gedolei hatorah after all, especially because the rest of them are only there because they were once married to the unnamed rosh yeshiva's second cousins; that is he is writing a book Torah vs. Science: A Polemic.

methinks he protesteth too much

remarkably creative and extremely erudite important and delightful delightful because of the intellectual excitement which her conceptual breakthrough generates. exciting, new historical framework extremely erudite, highly stimulating monograph. excitingly original and remarkably erudite monograph unquestionably exciting, valid and important.

*(if you do not understand this try googling the above paragraph. notice that all of the other results are word lists which are the only other place you will find so many permutations of exciting.) or else maybe it is really really exciting.

Outhing (no typo) Maimonidean

ever wonder who the blogger "maimonidean" (or something like that) is? immanent eschaton investegative reporters may have found the answer...
in the revealingly bizarrely named blog "hirhurim" one "yissachar" left a comment reading:

Nachum *Eliezer Rabinovitch
Yissachar Homepage 08.24.07 - 1:57 am #

This comment is entirely cryptic. It seems to contain an encoded message, which perhaps can help reveal the true identity of "yissachar" or "the maimonidean." In fact this comment was reminiscent of similarly indecipherable comments/posts which were left on a variety of pruzhaner blogs during the spring of 2007 e.g. :

Wanneer de zestiende Nissan, de dag waarop de ‘omer meel geofferd werd in de
Tempel, op een Sjabbat viel, werd de voor het offer vereiste gerst op die
heilige dag afgesneden, omdat de Tora verordend heeft dat het verbod om op
Sjabbat te oogsten, opzij gezet moet worden om dit offer mogelijk te maken. Uit
eerbeid voor de Sjabbat besliste Rabbi Jismaël dat slechts drie se’a gerst
afgesneden mochten worden om het meel te maken, in plaats van de vijf se’a die
op een werkdag afgesneden werden voor het meel.

upon further investigation, immanent eschaton staff revealed that besides for the shared literary style roughly resembling finnegan's wake, there is also the shared fondness for multiple, and stolen, identities.
as anonymous would say "w'dzoq"

Best of The Best of the Web

'It's From the Sun, All Right'
"Scientists Confirm Long-Held Theory About Source of Sunlight"--headline, Princeton University press release, Aug. 20

Chaitred

As Jonathan Chait has been taking a beating lately, I thought it would be a good idea to pile on by attacking his defense of Bush hatred. In this post Chait argues that Bush hatred is perfectly understandable because Bush refused to give out his signature as freely as his predecessor.

Dick Armey, the House Republican majority leader when Bush took office (and no more a shrinking violet than DeLay), told me a story that captures the exquisite pettiness of most members of Congress and the arrogance that made Bush and Rove so inept at handling them. "For all the years he was president," Armey told me, "Bill Clinton and I had a little thing we'd do where every time I went to the White House, I would take the little name tag they give you and pass it to the president, who, without saying a word, would sign and date it. Bill Clinton and I didn't like each other. He said I was his least-favorite member of Congress. But he knew that when I left his office, the first schoolkid I came across would be given that card, and some kid who had come to Washington with his mama would go home with the president's autograph. I think Clinton thought it was a nice thing to do for some kid, and he was happy to do it." Armey said that when he went to his first meeting in the White House with President Bush, he explained the tradition with Clinton and asked the president if he would care to continue it. "Bush refused to sign the card. Rove, who was sitting across the table, said, 'It would probably wind up on eBay,'" Armey continued.

When I wrote an article several years ago defending Bush hatred, numerous conservative critics were incredulous that I could find the man personally distasteful. Everybody knows Bush is a great guy! This just showed what a crazy liberal I was! But Bush isn't a great guy. He's a jerk. -Jonathan Chait

me: A cursory glance at the comments however, do about as good a job of destroying his justification as one could ask for:

Those of us who did our home-work knew that G.W. Bush was a petty, mean-spirited, malicious jerk way back in 2000, and before. Drunken pissing all over people's cars at a fancy party, leading the hazing and tormenting of frat pledges, his condescending habit of giving essentially diminutive nicknames to his underlings, skipping out on his Guard service, all around sense of entitlement, etc., etc. If just a few hundred more Americans had done their home-work, this arrogant cretin wouldn't be in the White House. Think of it! Only the most brain-dead wing-nut would dare to assert we wouldn't be vastly better off today.

me: hmm, that would make a good bumper sticker

National Unity

Although the Weekly Standard and the New Republic agree about very little lately, its nice to see that they can bipartisanly agree that the Simpson's Movie stunk.

Imagine A World Without Global Warming

Arctic August: NYC Sets Record For Coldest Day
High Of 59 Degrees Ties Chilliest August High Set In 1911

"This unusual blast of cold air smashed our previous record for the coldest high temperature on August 21, which is 64 degrees, set back in 1999," CBS 2 meteorologist Jason Cali told wcbstv.com.
In fact, the 59-degree high tied the record for the coldest high temperature ever for the month of August in New York City, when it reached just 59 degrees in 1911.Today's highs are more common in the city for the final days of October, when the average high ranges from 59 degrees to 61 degrees.

immanent eschaton, however takes this as just another sign of the impending ice age.

Its Like 2004 All Over Again

Hurricane Dean devastates before downgrade

Breaking News!

CHAVRUSA TUMULT AT BMG

B"H there have been no casualties, sources say.

Not Too Bright

From the Guardian online:

News agency Reuters has been forced to admit that footage it released last week purportedly showing Russian submersibles on the seabed of the North Pole actually came from the movie Titanic.

The images were reproduced around the world - including by the Guardian and Guardian Unlimited - alongside the story of Russia planting its flag below the North Pole on Thursday last week.

But it has now emerged that the footage actually showed two Finnish-made Mir submersibles that were employed on location filming at the scene of the wreck of the RMS Titanic ship in the north Atlantic some 10 years ago.

This footage was used in sequences in James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster about the 1912 disaster.

The mistake was only revealed after a 13-year-old Finnish schoolboy contacted a local newspaper to tell them the images looked identical to those used in the movie.

Reuters has admitted that it took the images from Russian state television channel RTR and wrongly captioned them as file footage originating from the Arctic.

Oddly enough, this story did not appear in Reuters Oddly Enough!

gil incites violence

i think gil student needs to be strongly condemned by the MO community for his incitement to violence recently. while it is true that he does claim he is not being literal, we cannot be sure someone won't act before reading his parenthetical addendum.

is bush pulling a clinton?

as a president's tenure approaches its close, what better time to look for a more positive place in the history books than by selling out israel? perhaps by funding the moderate wing of al queida. or arranging for a peace conference between moderate so-called militants and their western "victims".

OpinionJournal.com

I wound up chatting at a reception a couple years ago with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia about his love of opera and his taste in popular culture. It turned out he was a huge fan of Fox's anti-terrorist drama "24," and he convinced me to watch it for the first time.Well, little did I know just how much of a fan Justice Scalia is of the fast-paced show. The Globe and Mail newspaper in Canada reports he positively gushed about the Fox series recently at a conference on homeland security in the Canadian capital of Ottawa that was attended by an international panel of judges. Mr. Scalia couldn't refrain from commenting after Canadian federal Judge Richard Mosley opined: "Thankfully, security agencies in all our countries do not subscribe to the mantra, 'What would Jack Bauer do?'"As viewers know, Jack Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, is a federal agent known for roughing up suspected terrorists who are holding out on important information."Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles!" Mr. Scalia interjected. "He saved hundreds of thousands of lives!" Indeed, Mr. Scalia was just warming up. "Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? Say that criminal law is against him?" he asked rhetorically. "Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so!"Other panelists promptly challenged the American jurist, arguing that some prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay on terrorism charges could be innocent. "I don't care about holding people. I really don't," Judge Scalia replied. After the panel broke up, he continued to wax enthusiastically about his favorite show.If I were the producers of "24" I would immediately invite Mr. Scalia to make a guest appearance on the series. Judicial decorum would probably prevent him from doing so, but who wouldn't want to see the highly expressive Mr. Scalia in the role of a judge presiding over the trial of an accused terrorist? -- John Fund

Roger Kimball On The Dangerous Book for Boys; also John Podhoretz On The Yiddish Policemen's Union (yulis links)

Minhagei Kalbisov

Rabbi Daniel Z. Feldman:

Some sefarim relate a story involving a meeting between the Nefesh Chayah, R. Yehoshua of Kutno, and the Avnei Nezer, in which the [Avnei Nezer] quoted a ruling in the name of the Ba’al Shem Tov. This ruling, based on a comment of Tosafot, was that if one began to pray before the latest time for davening, the prayer is acceptable, even if the prayer continues after the time has passed. R. Yehoshua of Kutno responded that he had heard this as well, but did not know where the Tosafot was. The Avnei Nezer thought for a moment, and then replied that he knew where it was: Berakhot 7a.

That Tosafot (s.v. Sh’ilmalei) comments on the gemara’s statement that Bilaam was able to discern G-d’s very brief moment of anger and use that opportunity to curse the Jews. If , however, the moment was so brief, how much could he have said in that time? The Tosafot offer two answers, the second being that if he started his curse at that moment, it would not have mattered had the remaining words taken beyond that time to complete. Thus, explained the Avnei Nezer, since Chazal tell us that the “measurement of good is greater than the measurement of disaster”, if a curse is effective under such circumstance, prayer certainly is. [The Kogaglover Rav (Resp. Eretz Zvi, I, 121, and II, p. 171), who was a student of the Avnei Nezer, quotes this idea as well, but attributes it not to him but to the Yid haKodesh of Psischa, and uses it to consider the question of Purim meals that start on Purim but continue into the next day. Resp. Dovev Meisharim, III, 11, also alludes to this point in the Purim Seudah context.]

The Responsa Minchat Yitzchak (IV, 48) questioned the veracity of this story, noting that its conclusion is contradicted by the poskim (See Shulchan Arukh O.C. 124:2, Magen Avraham, 4; and 232:2, Magen Avraham, 2, and 89:4 ). However, after considering some possible support for this idea in other contexts, he concludes that the logic is effective in allowing a prayer to be considered with the community, as long as it began with the community

Perhaps this can explain the longstanding Kalbisover minhag of missing z'man tefilah by approximately two minutes, which has become a point of mockery for the scoffers who do not understand why they cannot just start two minutes earlier, or else much later. In truth, this minhag is based wish to simultaneously demonstrate support for the Ba'al Shem Tov's position and for the hasidic tradition of missing the z'man. Were they to start just before the z'man, that would indicate either: that they disagree with the Ba'al Shem Tov and consider finishing after the z'man to be like missing the z'man; or, that they agree with the Ba'al Shem Tov but disregard hasidic tradition. However, by missing the z'man by two minutes they show that they indeed careful to follow tradition, and that they are in agreement with the Ba'al Shem Tov's position.

It's like Making of a Godol Online! BTW, rumor has it YU fired Perl, by all accounts their most popular teacher, probably because he was popular. But then maybe they didn't like the attacks on the Soloveichiks.

The Pressing Issues We Face

Pardon the pun. But seriously, I think it's about time somebody has brought attention to this issue.
Judge Who Seeks Millions for Lost Pants Has His (Emotional) Day in Court

The "willful and malicious conduct" Pearson described consisted of this: In 2005, Pearson was starting his new job as a judge and therefore needed to start wearing suits again after a couple of years of unemployment. He brought five suits in for alterations because he'd put on 20 pounds and needed to have the pants let out. Four suits came back fine. One came back without the pants. Pearson says the Chung family -- Korean immigrants who came here from the charcoal factories of Seoul in 1992 and now own three cleaners, including the one a short walk from Pearson's place in the Fort Lincoln section of Northeast -- had no intention of living up to the sign in their shop that said "Satisfaction Guaranteed." Therefore, Pearson said, he had no choice but to take on "the awesome responsibility" of suing the Chungs on behalf of every resident of the District of Columbia...

Pearson presented a series of witnesses who told of unhappy experiences at Custom. Their satisfaction, they said, was hardly guaranteed. But every one of Pearson's witnesses told the defense that in fact, they would have been entirely satisfied if they had been given credit for free cleaning or compensation in the amount of the value of their damaged or lost garment. Most of the witnesses said they'd generally had good experiences at Custom, and not one of Pearson's witnesses said anything about deserving millions of dollars. Witnesses depicted Soo Chung, the mom in the Mom and Pop operation, as someone who was pleasant and professional -- until a dispute arose, at which point she told several of the customers that it was they who had brought in damaged goods, not the shop that had caused any problem with an article of clothing. Grace Hewell, a retired congressional staffer, said Jin Chung, Soo's husband, "chased me out of the store" when she complained that her suit pants "looked like they had been washed" and no longer fit properly. "At 89, I'm not ready to be chased," she said. "But I was in World War II as a WAC, so I think I can take care of myself. Having lived in Germany and knowing the people who were victims of the Nazis, I thought he was going to beat me up. I thought of what Hitler had done to thousands of Jews." After questioning eight witnesses, Pearson spent two hours telling his own story, but as he came to the part about when Soo Chung finally told him she had found the missing pants, the tale of the $10.50 alteration that went awry proved to be too much. "These are not my pants," Pearson recalled telling Chung when she handed him a pair of gray pants with cuffs. "I have in my adult life, with one exception, never worn pants with cuffs." "And she said, 'These are your pants.' " Pearson paused. He struggled to breathe deeply. He could not continue. Pearson blurted a request for a break, stood up, turned around and walked out of the courtroom, tears dripping from his full and reddened eyes. When he returned, he called that moment when Chung offered him the wrong pants "a Twilight Zone experience," and again, he welled up and had to halt the proceedings.

The Democratic Party: Hezb No Allah?

Good article at the Spectator about religion in politics:

The dirty little secret of Democrat party politics is that secularists fill a role very similar to the one occupied by evangelicals on the Republican side. They are becoming a reliable voting bloc. There is a far larger religion gap than there is a gender gap, but only the latter has been extensively covered. Christian fundamentalism is frequently emphasized, but secularism is completely missed. It has only been in the most recent election cycle (2006) that the "God gap" has received significant attention and then it was to emphasize that religious voters were coming back to the Democratic party. Coverage has typically been short on attention to secularists, focusing instead on the movement of religious voters.Political scientists Gerald De Maio and Louis Bolce have pointed out that one never hears about how the Democrats "have shorn up their base among the unchurched, atheists, and agnostics." Nevertheless, when you see evolution suddenly become a persistent issue in presidential debates, something very much like that shoring up is happening. Markers are being set out. "Stay away from this wicked person, my son. He has inadequate respect for the marriage of molecules and random chance."

Anonymous: Take Back NP Quick!

From a review of Andrew Ferguson's new book:

I admire both of these books, but apparently in my admiration I can be viewed as an oddity, at least by New York Post columnist John Podhoretz., who has written about the Ferguson book. In a column of tortured praise for it, Podhoretz notes that "writers don't really root for each other. Usually they root against each other." Well, many of us writers have long been in awe of Podhoretz's essential smallness. Here he reveals himself as so cemented in it that he psychologically projects smallness on the rest of us. Acknowledging that Ferguson has written a fine book, Podhoretz confides, "The dark secret is that I would have been happy to think Land of Lincoln wasn't very good." It takes a person of colossal narcissism to make such an admission in public, but I thank him for it. The ass has given me another good day.

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator, a contributing editor to the New York Sun, and an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Mysterious. (agav, read JP's article for yourself, the praise is not at all tortured.) There does seem to be some basis for these charges. According to what appears to be a left wing conspiracy website, Rightweb, "In New York Magazine, Hannah Rosin described Podhoretz as a difficult boss who has "inherited his father's literary narcissism, but without the ideological vigor" (New York, January 5, 1998).
However, it is odd to here this criticism coming from a prominent conservative who as recently as June 19, 2006, had this to say: "John Podhoretz is also a seasoned journalist and editor. When he lived in Washington he edited a style page for the Washington Times that gave the Washington Post's style page a run for its money. He could do so because he has a formidable knowledge of politics, political history, and popular culture. " I wonder what happened since.

The best episode yet of "WHAT'S YOUR PROBLEM" Jonah Goldberg and Peter Beinart discussing religion. (Plot spoiler: Beinart attends an orthodox synagogue)

Great article by Taranto about college degrees.

Giuliani '08?

From The New Republic's Thomas B. Edsall:

...Texas does not rank among the top five states in donations for either Mitt Romney or McCain, and no Texas metropolitan area is a major source of cash for their bids. By contrast, for Giuliani, Texas ranks third--behind New York and California--while Dallas and Houston place second and fourth on his list of top donor cities.

Another element of the Reagan tradition to which Giuliani can lay claim--and that bolsters his chance of winning the nomination--is his appeal to white, working-class voters: the Reagan Democrats who became the angry white men of the 1990s. Their switch to the GOP fractured the class basis of the New Deal coalition, and they have been crucial to every Republican presidential victory since 1968. These are Giuliani's people. He is pro-cop, anti-Sharpton, the mayor whose meritocratic streak led him to end the open admissions policy at the City University of New York. He stood in a flat-bed truck in front of City Hall in 1992 and told 10,000 beer-drinking cops that a proposed civilian review board was "bullshit" designed "to protect David Dinkins's political ass." He famously lectured a mother whose son had been killed in a hail of police bullets, "Maybe you should ask yourself some questions about the way he was brought up and the things that happened to him"--rhetoric that harkened back to George Wallace's insistence that the government stop "coddling" criminals because they "didn't have enough asparagus as a child." Giuliani was the tough guy who restored order to a city verging on chaos by breaking the back of the liberal interest groups that had once dominated local politics; and many white, lower- and middle-income voters in the outer boroughs loved him for it. They, more than any other factor, are the reason he was twice elected mayor of one of the country's most Democratic cities. And their hero now uses the same tough rhetoric that he once used to talk about criminals to talk about terrorists.

Giuliani's brand of conservatism also speaks to the Republican longing for managerial competence--something that has been woefully lacking under Bush. The statistics from Giuliani's tenure in New York suggest that he knows how to get results: Under his leadership, the city's murder rate fell by 63 percent; overall crime declined by 52 percent; vehicle thefts dropped by 71 percent; the number of children in foster care fell by 34 percent; the welfare case load declined by 59 percent; unemployment dropped by 40 percent; construction permits rose by 51 percent; and personal income rose by 53 percent. Of course, Giuliani's role in improving life for New Yorkers has almost certainly been overstated--most of all by Giuliani himself. The city's drop in crime was part of a national trend that actually began under Dinkins, and the economic boom of the '90s didn't hurt, either. What's more, Giuliani's managerial diligence is inseparable from his authoritarian streak, perhaps the least appealing aspect of his persona. Still, deserved or not, Giuliani's reputation as a skilled manager has been a very real asset in his campaign so far, allowing him to criticize Bush credibly on Iraq--the issue that, more than any other, symbolizes this administration's managerial shortcomings. "Here's what I would change," Giuliani told Larry King when asked how he would have handled the assault on Iraq. "Do it with more troops, maybe 100,000, 150,000 more." Giuliani harkens back to a time when Republicans were perceived as more competent, sober administrators than Democrats--and he affirms the nagging suspicion of many rank-and-file conservatives that Iraq could have been a stunning success if only George W. Bush weren't such a buffoon.

ut perhaps the most striking way in which Giuliani captures the mood of contemporary Republican politics has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with strategy. Both Reagan and Bush were masters of polarization. They calculated that it would be better to win by one vote, with a clear policy mandate, than to try to bring along a less committed 60 percent of the electorate with an appeal to consensus and compromise. In 2004, this strategy became clearer than ever, as Republicans sought to capitalize on deepening chasms between left and right. Deliberate polarization may or may not prove an effective strategy in the 2008 general election, but it is deeply attractive to conservative GOP primary voters whose antipathy to liberalism is intense.

Giuliani's entire career has been built on a willingness to polarize. Consider the vote totals in different neighborhoods in 1993, when he ousted Dinkins, New York's first black mayor. The election was close--Giuliani won by fewer than 50,000 votes--but the overall tally masked bitter partisan and racial divides. In heavily minority Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Dinkins won by margins of 38 to one. Meanwhile, Giuliani carried predominantly white Staten Island's South Shore by twelve to one, Howard Beach and Ozone Park by five to one, and Bensonhurst by eight to one. And, once he took office, Giuliani only seemed to grow more eager to stoke divisions through repeated head-on collisions with icons of the left, welfare-rights organizations, and the aclu. Indeed, if there is one hallmark of Giuliani's career as a prosecutor and mayor, it is his compulsion to fight without restraint--whether the enemy is the mafia, the education establishment, or his estranged second wife.

Giuliani is now pursuing the same strategy of sowing division, only this time on a national level. To hear him tell it, the election will pit weak-kneed Democrats against hard-line Republicans. "I listen a little to the Democrats, and, if one of them gets elected, we are going on defense," he recently told an audience in New Hampshire. "We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation, and we will be back to our preSeptember 11 attitude of defense."

There is good reason to believe this rhetoric will win over a portion of GOP voters. As Rick Perlstein has pointed out in The New Republic, at a moment when conservatism is philosophically adrift--among other problems, it is currently tethered to an unsuccessful war, one whose premises may not have been all that conservative in the first place--the single thing that truly unites and energizes conservatives is a raw animosity toward liberals. With so many Republican policies having failed over the past six years, contemporary conservatism is less interested in policy and more defined by style. Nothing characterizes that style quite as well as bashing liberals. And Giuliani knows how to bash liberals. Neither McCain nor Romney nor even Newt Gingrich can match Rudy's record in confronting the ideological enemies on conservatism's Most Wanted list. It is in this climate that the tendency to say and do impolitic things--a characteristic that might ordinarily be seen as a drawback for a candidate--has become perhaps Rudy's greatest strength.