David Brooks: 

As in many other areas, the biggest education debates are happening within the Democratic Party. On the one hand, there are the reformers like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, who support merit pay for good teachers, charter schools and tough accountability standards. On the other hand, there are the teachers’ unions and the members of the Ed School establishment, who emphasize greater funding, smaller class sizes and superficial reforms.

....

During the presidential race, Barack Obama straddled the two camps. One campaign adviser, John Schnur, represented the reform view in the internal discussions. Another, Linda Darling-Hammond, was more likely to represent the establishment view.The candidates before Obama apparently include: Joel Klein, the highly successful New York chancellor who has, nonetheless, been blackballed by the unions; Arne Duncan, the reforming Chicago head who is less controversial; Darling-Hammond herself; and some former governor to be named later, with Darling-Hammond as the deputy secretary.

I give ten to one odds against him picking someone who will upset the establishment. 

Obama Admits He Was Wrong on Surge?!

PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA I'm going to be making announcement tomorrow about the head of our Veterans Administration, General Eric Shinseki, who was a commander and has fought in Vietnam, Bosnia, is somebody who has achieved the highest level of military service. He has agreed that he is willing to be part of this administration because both he and I share a reverence for those who serve. I grew up in Hawaii, as he did. My grandfather is in the Punch Bowl National Cemetery. When I reflect on the sacrifices that have been made by our veterans and, I think about how so many veterans around the country are struggling even more than those who have not served — higher unemployment rates, higher homeless rates, higher substance abuse rates, medical care that is inadequate — it breaks my heart, and I think that General Shinseki is exactly the right person who is going to be able to make sure that we honor our troops when they come home.

BROKAW: He's the man who lost his job in the Bush Administration because he said we will need more troops in Iraq than Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld thought we would need at that time.

PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA: He was right.

Don't Worry, Not All Liberals Are This Dumb

Political Punch:
As first reported in this morning's Washington Post, Washington State artist Deborah Lawrence -- asked to submit an ornament to hang on the White House Christmas Tree -- designed one that featured the text of a House Resolution to impeach President Bush, along with images of her "hero" Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., a co-sponsor of the bill.
"The ornament is supposed to represent my state," Lawrence told ABC News just now as she walked to the White House. The design also included "messages of peace," and images from the 1999 World Trade Organization protests and the Washington State suffrage movement -- "messages of progressive politics," Lawrence says. "It's all in minute type so that's why I think it got past the first censors," she adds.

But now comes news that the White House is not going to hang the ornament. First Lady Laura Bush's press secretary Sally McDonough told the Post of Lawrence's ornament, "it really is too bad. I haven't seen the ornament, but I would hope that no one would take this as an opportunity to be divisive and partisan. There is a time and place for everything, and I don't think this is either." "So now I don't know if I'm going to be invited," Lawrence says. "I'm disappointed because the act of making the ornament was really just an earnest wish to represent my state, I didn't think it would lead to suppression of freedom of speech. I feel a little weak at the knees that they might not invite me in."

Obama Campaign: We won't raise taxes, we'll just collect the same amount more often

Report: Obama Didn't Have as Many Small Donors as Was Hyped

November 25, 2008 9:26 AM

The Campaign Finance Institute issued a "Reality Check" report that demolishes the myth that President-elect Obama was largely funded by small donors.

In reality, says the non-partisan group, the percentage of small donors who gave to the Obama campaign -- 26 percent -- is roughly the same as the percentage of small donors who contributed to President Bush's reelection in 2004, 25 percent.

....

The Obama team rejects the fundamental hypothesis of the study. If you were a donor who saved up to donate $20 to the campaign every couple months over the course of two years, an aide says, and all of those contributions eventually added up to more than $200, that doesn't mean you’re not a small dollar donor.

A Good Thing About the Election Being Over

is that we can go back to reading Christopher Hitchens again (although you could have read his brother. They're both Jewish, by the way):

The objection I make is therefore twofold. First, the election of Obama is the effect not the cause of the changes. (One of my questioners appeared to think that our president-elect had been responsible for the decision in Brown v. Board of Education.) Second, a Republican victory would have had absolutely no effect on the legal or political standing of black Americans, which is a matter of our law and our Constitution and cannot be undone by any ephemeral vote or plebiscite.

....

The recognition of these obvious points should also alert us to a related danger, which is the cousinhood of euphoria and hysteria. Those who think that they have just voted to legalize Utopia (and I hardly exaggerate when I say this; have you been reading the moist and trusting comments of our commentariat?) are preparing for a disillusionment that I very much doubt they will blame on themselves. The national Treasury is an echoing, empty vault; our Russian and Iranian enemies are acting even more wolfishly even as they sense a repudiation of Bush-Cheney; the lines of jobless and evicted are going to lengthen, and I don't think a diet of hope is going to cover it. Nor even a diet of audacity, though can you picture anything less audacious than the gray, safety-first figures who have so far been chosen by Obama to be on his team?

There is an element of the "wannabe" about all this—something that suggests that, if the clock were to be rolled back, every living white person would now automatically stand with John Brown at Harper's Ferry and with John Lewis at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. All the evidence we have is to the contrary: Abraham Lincoln ringingly denounced John Brown, and John F. Kennedy (he of the last young and pretty family to occupy the Executive Mansion) was embarrassed and annoyed by the March on Washington. In other words, there is something pain-free and self-congratulatory about the Obama surge.

Obama Demigod Watch

Amongst the AP's (through the Corner) gushing over Barack Obama's literariness, there is this sentence:

Obama's student poetry was even lauded — and compared to the work of Langston Hughes — by the most discerning of critics, Harold Bloom.

Obama's poetry, recorded here, was shown to Bloom by the New Yorker, who recommends Obama not quit his day job:

Harold Bloom, who in fifty-three years of teaching literature at Yale University has had many undergraduate poems pressed hopefully upon him said, when reached by telephone in New Haven last week, that he was not familiar with Obama’s oeuvre. But after studying the poems he said that he was not unimpressed with the young man’s efforts—at least, by the standards established by other would-be bards within the political sphere. “At eighteen, as an undergraduate, he was already a much better poet than our former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, who keeps publishing terrible poetry,” Bloom said. (Cohen has published two collections of verse: “Of Sons and Seasons,” in 1978, and “A Baker’s Nickel,” in 1986.) “And then there is Jimmy Carter, who is in my judgment literally the worst poet in the United States.” (Carter’s first volume of poetry, “Always a Reckoning and Other Poems,” which was published in 1994, included a work called “Why We Get Cheaper Tires from Liberia”: “No churches can be built / no privy holes or even graves / dug in the rolling hills / for those milking Firestone’s trees, who die / from mamba and mosquito bites.”) Of the two Obama poems, Bloom said, “Pop” was “not bad—a good enough folk poem with some pathos and humor and affection.” He went on, “It is not wholly unlike Langston Hughes, who tended to imitate Carl Sandburg.” Bloom was fascinated by Obama’s use of an unusual verb, “shink” (“He . . . Stands, shouts, and asks / For a hug, as I shink, my / Arms barely reaching around / His thick, oily neck”), a word that does not appear in any of the dictionaries that Bloom consulted but which is defined in an online slang dictionary as “an evasive sinking maneuver.”

“It undoubtedly was a word that was in common usage, having to do with feeling very strong emotion, in this case a very strong need for comfort,” Bloom said. He takes the subtext of the poem to be Obama’s reckoning with his absent father, for whom his grandfather is, inevitably, an inadequate substitute. “This is, in effect, his own father,” Bloom said. “That’s very touching, and it also shows a kind of humane and sad wit. There’s a mind there.” “Underground,” Bloom said, is the better poem of the two. “It gave me the oddest feeling that he might have been reading the poems of D. H. Lawrence—it reminded me of the poem ‘Snake,’ ” Bloom went on. “I think it is about some sense of chthonic forces, just as Lawrence frequently is—some sense, not wholly articulated, of something below, trying to break through.”Poetry aside, Bloom has formed a good impression of Obama—“Though if Mayor Bloomberg runs, I am voting for him,” he added. In any case, he said, Obama has chosen the right career, at least if it comes to a tossup between politico and poet. “If I had been shown these poems by one of my undergraduates and asked, Shall I go on with it?, I would have rubbed my forehead and said, On the whole, my dear, probably not. Your future is not as a person of letters,” Bloom pronounced. “But they would by no means have seemed to me unworthy of my attention.”

Get your very own 2D Barack Obama while you still can! When we get the 3D version, these coins will be as common as the Carter half dollar.

How Hope Will Destroy Jon Stewart

NY Magazine:

It's no secret that plenty of satirical outlets — Saturday Night Live, the Onion, late-night talk shows — have had trouble finding good Obama jokes. But we're not forecasting their doom. The Daily Show is unique, though, in its audience and in its comedic approach, and we're very worried that an Obama presidency might send Jon Stewart's show speedily on the road to obsolescence.

Why? First of all, in one eventful day, the prototypical Daily Show viewer has been transformed: Once disaffected and angry at Washington's power structure, he's now delighted and hopeful about the new president and all that he symbolizes. And if you're an Obama fan — eager to give Barack the benefit of the doubt, and proud and excited about the change you've helped bring the nation — do you really want Jon Stewart sitting on the sidelines, taking potshots at your hero?

Beyond the problem of audiences souring on Obama jokes is the question of whether Jon Stewart even wants to make Obama jokes. Of course, The Daily Show has found ways to goof on the Obama campaign, but it's no secret that Stewart and his writing staff lean leftward. And The Daily Show differs from nearly all other popular political satire in that the show's strength is in its writers' outrage and anger at the powers that be. Stewart memorably described the show's writing process to Michiko Kakutani as a bunch of "curmudgeons" writing about the things that upset them the most. If President Obama's administration is the love-in that progressives hope it will be, we think it's awfully unlikely Stewart's heart will be in Obama-bashing. The guy teared up at eleven on Election Night! Not that we didn't, but still.

So let's say that Stewart's half-hearted Obama gags just keep on flopping on The Daily Show. ("Your William Ayers joke bombed," a sage Chris Wallace observed on last night's episode.) With Bush and Cheney heading off into the sunset, and Sarah Palin hopping a charter back to Wasilla, who's left to skewer?

Best Election Day Prediction

goes to ....

Mark Steyn

The one prediction I can make with confidence is that we won’t get the result we should get — which is a McGovern-esque candidate going down to a McGovern-sized defeat. Instead, we face three options: an Obama landslide or a narrower Obama win, both of which would be bad for the nation and the world; or a narrow McCain victory, which would be bad for our already diseased politics and seems likely to unhinge even further the Democratic Party base, which isn’t good for civilized political discourse. So I can’t really see any happy endings on Tuesday night. I don’t think it’ll be an Obama landslide, and, if I have to flip between one or other of the 51-49 scenarios, I guess I’m more or less obliged to plump for a narrow McCain-Palin victory. Not a lot of science behind that hunch. Obama will do worse than polls suggest in the Appalachians and rust belt, which is just as well, because I’d say either Virginia and/or North Carolina will go blue. Which I guess is my way of saying the Eastern time zone will determine how the night goes, and everything else will be just mopping up. In the Senate, Norm Coleman and Susan Collins will survive in Minnesota and Maine, but not Elizabeth Dole down south. And the Democrats won’t get to 60, but with the Maine ladies and other soft-spined Republicans, who says they’ll need to?

Reasons to be hopeful about an Obama presidency

If Michael Moore believes this, what are the chances it is true:

Personally, the opportunity to vote for someone like Barack Obama will be one of the greatest things I will have done in my life. The Republicans aren't kidding when they say he's the "most liberal" senator in the Senate. When have we ever had the chance to vote for the "most liberal" of anything? [snip]

As for the things Obama has said that I don't agree with — like expanding the war in Afghanistan and creating a health care system that is not single-payer — well, on these points I'm hoping he's a politician. Politicians never keep all their promises. So those are two I'm hoping he'll break!

Mickey Kaus on the eve of elections:

Thank you, Ohio! Tomorrow, if all goes as expected, Democrats should pause to be grateful that John Kerry didn't get 70,000 more votes in Ohio in 2004. What would have happened if Kerry had won? 1) He would have presided over a slow motion loss, or continuing stalemate, in Iraq. No way Kerry would ever have approved the "surge." 2) He would also have presided over the current housing and financial collapse that has both broken economic growth and, apparently, destroyed any chances of the incumbent party retaining the White House. Democrats don't bear the main blame for this crisis, but is there any reason to think they would have prevented it? I can't think of one. We'd be looking at a Republican wave instead of a Democratic sweep. ... 7:46 P.M.

a subject on which michelle and barack agreed

'It's Too Early. He Hasn't Done Anything Yet.' John Podhoretz - 10.31.2008 - 6:52 PM

Michelle Obama on Barack Obama, 2004. Video here.

McCain Supporters Electrocute Children

read all about it

Obama Lies About Last Flirtation with Marxism

abc reports:

Blasting back at McCain’s criticism of his tax plan, Obama ridiculed his opponent’s assertion. “He's called me a socialist for wanting to roll back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans so we can finally give tax relief to the middle class. I don't know what's next,” Obama said at a rally at the Halifax mall here. “By the end of the week, he'll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten. I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

but if mccain wanted to paint obama as a marxist, wouldn't they have more up to date material?

"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully," the Democratic presidential candidate wrote in his memoir, "Dreams From My Father."
"The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists."Obama's interest in leftist politics continued after he transferred to Columbia University in New York. He lived on Manhattan's Upper East Side, venturing to the East Village for what he called "the socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union."

update: more here

Actually, that wasn't the smear I was looking for

obama for president!

if this  is not a good reason to support obama, i dont' know what is: 

The other was a hot summer afternoon in Iowa. Obama was flipping burgers at a backyard barbecue, in what the campaign hoped would be an exquisite photo opportunity. A fly began circling his head. Then more flies. Pretty soon flies were swarming him, the burgers -- everything. It was awful to watch. But in rhythmic fashion he began waving them off with his hand. He scooped up the burgers and headed back to the picnic table, as if nothing had gone wrong. That small episode told me something about Obama's temperament. I would have wanted to fling the grill over the fence in frustration.

Palin, vetted at last

Mark Steyn links to this story:

When federal judges in San Francisco ruled in 2002 that reciting the
Pledge of Allegiance in public schools was unconstitutional because it included the phrase "under God," Sarah Palin was not amused. Palin, who at the time was Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, quickly drafted a terse letter to the editor of a San Francisco newspaper. “Dear Editor,” Palin wrote in 2002. “San Francisco judges forbidding our Pledge of Allegiance? They will take the phrase ‘under God’ away from me when my cold, dead lips can no longer utter those words,” Palin wrote. “God Bless America,” she concluded.

Hundreds of notes and lettersPalin’s letter to the editor is one of hundreds of personal notes and letters written by the former Mayor, and obtained this week to NBC News and others. The documents shed light on the management style--and personality--of the small town mayor turned vice presidential candidate.

There are few headline grabbers in the lot. Even Palin’s Pledge-of-Allegiance rant was a commonly held view at the time. (The U.S. Supreme Court later overturned the ruling on technical grounds. But not before Palin pushed through a city resolution stating that the Wasilla City Council “shall continue to recite America’s Pledge of Allegiance, in its entirety, including and especially the words, ‘…one nation, under God…”)While hardly earth shattering, Palin’s personal missives can be revealing.Consider the letter to Mike Doogan, then a columnist for the Anchorage Daily News.Doogan had written in the paper on March 5, 2002, that lawmakers were considering moving the state legislature to Wasilla. “Now, I disrespect Wasilla as much as the next guy, but this seems a little extreme,” Doogan quipped. “Isn't being a blight on the landscape enough shame for Wasillians?”Palin couldn’t resist. Two days later, she wrote a personal letter that simply said:“Dear Mr. Doogan: Why do you do what you do to Wasilla?”She signed it, “Respectfully, Sarah.”

after what's described here, advice for palin here

via commentary this poll:

Differences between Orthodox and non-Orthodox are pronounced in the support given the presidential candidates.
Thus, Obama has the support of 13 percent of Orthodox Jews, as against 59 percent of Conservative Jews, 62 percent of Reform Jews, and 61 percent of the “Just Jewish.”

Conversely, McCain draws 78 percent of Orthodox Jews, as against 26 percent of Conservative Jews, 27 percent of Reform Jews, and 26 percent of the “Just Jewish.”

Jewish women (60 percent) are more likely than Jewish men (54 percent) to support Obama. Conversely, Jewish men (35 percent) are more likely than Jewish women (25 percent) to support McCain.

also:

On the question of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, 42 percent of American Jews support the U.S. taking military action against Iran, while 47 percent are opposed.
Regarding the Arab-Israeli peace process, 56 percent of American Jews do not think “there will come a time when Israel and its Arab neighbors will be able to settle their differences and live in peace;” 38 percent think such a time will come.

Jay Nordlinger posts a reader's letter:

This next letter is from a very thoughtful Detroiter who has long been a liberal Democrat — and who has been turning, turning (like some other people we know):

Well, although I do have qualms about her present fitness to be president, Jay, I like her. And her nomination and the reaction to it is significant for me personally — it marks my final break with liberalism, even of the more center-left variety.

It’s one thing to criticize her political qualifications, and there are legitimate questions about that. The Left’s and the media’s reaction to her has been disgraceful and disgusting. Equally vile are those people who are perfectly capable of opposing her politically while speaking up for her right to be treated fairly — but who fail to do so.

If nothing else, this should put paid to the notion that the Democratic party supports and cares about average Americans. If I hadn’t already decided to vote for McCain on national-security grounds, I would do so simply because people like this should not have the power to deal with the lives of ordinary people.

I thought Jonah Goldberg somewhat overstated the case in his book about the fascist roots of much liberal thought and conduct; I’m no longer so sure.

Jennifer Rubin remarks on Obama's humorlessness:

Peter Robinson is right about the power of humor – and come to think of it, doesn’t the funnier candidate always win? (Kennedy funnier than Nixon, Reagan funnier than Carter, Clinton funnier than George H.W. Bush).

I would take her thesis one step further: wooden stick funnier than Al Gore...

Elitism & Eliteness III

Yuval Levin:

I think Jonah gets it right on that Brooks column. I would be an elitist if we had an elite that was able to govern. We don’t. Not even close. And what our cultural and political elites tend to lack most of all is prudence. Edmund Burke, the original conservative elitist, argued (in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs) that the lives led by the elites of his day taught them good judgment and prudence, and that was why they should rule. But the process by which people qualify for and retain elite standing in our own society tends to rob people of prudence; not in every case but in the great majority. Certainly being a senator for a long time is not good training in prudence—a fact that reflects on John McCain as well as on Joe Biden. That doesn’t make me a populist—I don’t think that lacking elite educational or cultural credentials or Washington experience is a positive qualification for governing. But I also don’t think having such credentials (given what they are and what they stand for in our time and place) is in itself much of a positive qualification for governing. I think we have to examine a person in finer detail, to get a sense of individual judgment and instinct. Sarah Palin comes off pretty well in such an examination—she has been a successful governor, for instance, and has run a city and a business too, and seems to have the right instincts on some key issues and the right attitude. All of that is important. It doesn’t make her the perfect vice presidential candidate (though it’s hard to see who among McCain’s plausible options would have been better and why) but I do think it makes her a good one, and a better choice for VP than Joe Biden.

Ms. Dowd Goes To Wasilla

nytimes:

I talked to a Wal-Mart mom, Betty Necas, 39, wearing sweatpants and tattoos on her wrists. She said she’s never voted, and was a teenage mom “like Bristol.”

She likes Sarah because she’s “down home” but said Obama “gives me the creeps. Nothing to do with the fact that he’s black. He just seems snotty, and he looks weaselly.”

Ten Obama supporters in Wasilla braved taunts and drizzle to stand on a corner between McDonald’s and Pizza Hut. They complained that Sarah runs government like a vengeful fiefdom and held up signs. A guy with a bullhorn yelled out of a passing red car: “Go back to the city, you liberal Communists!”

Elitist not elite II

musings notes this particularly egregious conflation of elitism with eliteness.

Like most members in good standing of the Washington media elite, I have naturally and inevitably grown to hate Sarah Palin. But that's okay, because the feeling is evidently mutual. At last week's convention, Palin went on about how "experts in Washington" were counting out McCain with their "usual certitude" and the "Washington elite" weren't taking her seriously because she isn't part of the club. Palin, you see, is a typical American -- a hockey mom who has "had the privilege of living most of [her] life in a small town," as part of a family that has "the same ups and downs as any other." "I also drive myself to work," she added, just in case we didn't get the point.

The aw-shucks act serves two purposes. First, claiming to be The Average is a useful mallet for beating down criticism as hopelessly snobbish -- as when Bill Kristol writes in this week's Weekly Standard that "the liberal elites" will appeal to their "anti-small town" prejudices when they try, presumably with their usual certitude, to keep Palin 3400 miles away from Washington. (I have no idea what "anti-small town" prejudices look like, but I guess I better get some.)

Second, and more importantly, Palin's everyday qualities are supposed to be an actual electoral and governmental asset -- as when Kristol writes (this time in the Times) that by picking a real-live "Wal-Mart Mom," John McCain might have a decisive number of voters saying, "It's about time." Reverse snobbery is the new snobbery: the way to win an election and govern a country is by seeming as ordinary as the limits of credulity allow.

Let me take the bait and make a plea for good old-fashioned elitism: It's not "about time" for an average American to occupy the White House (or the Naval Observatory), and the notion that some ossified and preening elite lords over Washington is silly.

Everyone is an elitist. We want elite doctors to treat our cuts and cancers. We want elite lawyers and accountants to smooth over our divorces and taxes. And we (some of us, anyway) want our elite soldiers to invade foreign countries. And we don't apologize for these preferences. In most contexts, "elite" is just another word for "merit."

So why don't many of us want elite politicians? The reverse snobs usually argue that Everywoman politicians are better at understanding everyone's problems. But even if this claim is true (and I'm pretty sure it isn't) it remains suspiciously unextended to all other aspects of social life. We don't think the lawyers who have been dragged through a messy divorce are more capable of handling a client's. Why?

And anyway, anti-elitism strikes me a strange pose for a through-and-through conservative. The helpful oversimplification is that conservatives are supposed to favor equality of opportunity ("everyone competes on equal footing, outcomes be damned") and liberals supposed to favor equality of outcome ("everyone deserves something, competition be damned"). Equality of opportunity is supposed to dictate that race, gender, geography, and nepotism count for nothing - they're all features that have nothing to do with merit. This principle is why the same Bill Kristol could write (about a different unqualified applicant, Harriet Miers) that there was "a gaping disproportion between the stakes associated with this vacancy and the stature of the person nominated to fill it." That she was a Bush loyalist and a woman said nothing about her merits. Palin's interest in hockey and commuting says equally little.

"Merit" might be tough to define and harder to locate -- as a member of the liberal elite, I certainly have some problems with it -- but as a theory, it hangs together coherently. Conservatives used to like it. But I guess all that flew out the window somewhere between Wasilla and Anchorage, maybe while Sarah Palin was driving herself to work.

— CONOR CLARKE

In fact, the puny-headed punditry propogated in these paragraphs itself proves the difference between Palin-like elites and the poor, pea-brained Washington elitists.

Update: I think this sentence summarizes the sentiment of this post:

Her perspective is different from that of other national politicians. For Barack Obama, Wal-Mart is a symbol of worker exploitation. For Hillary Clinton, it’s a former source of corporate-director fees. For Sarah Palin, it’s a place where you buy stuff.

When is the last time someone insisted that their doctor not shop at Wal-Mart, and instead look down on people who do? This has nothing to do with eliteness, it is cultural elitism, which is not helpful in governing, perhaps much the opposite.

Obama's Rabbi Relative

September 14, 2008 11:57 AM

So nu?

How has this escaped mention by Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., in his swings through Southern Florida?

The Jewish Daily Forward reports that one of Michelle Obama's cousins is the most prominent African-American rabbi in the U.S., Rabbi Capers Funnye, chief rabbi of Chicago's Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation.

A shul with soul -- check it out.

Michelle Obama’s paternal grandfather, Frasier Robinson Jr., was the brother of Funnye's mother, Verdelle Robinson Funnye (born Verdelle Robinson).

"Although Funnye’s congregation describes itself as Ethiopian Hebrew," the Forward reports, "it is not connected to the Ethiopian Jews, commonly called Beta Israel, who have immigrated to Israel en masse in recent decades. It is also separate from the Black Hebrews in Dimona, Israel, and the Hebrew Israelite black supremacist group whose incendiary street harangues have become familiar spectacles in a number of American cities. Funnye converted to Judaism and was ordained as a rabbi under the supervision of black Israelite rabbis, then went through another conversion supervised by Orthodox and Conservative rabbis. He serves on the Chicago Board of Rabbis."

In other Obama-and-the-Jews Democratic fardeiget, a group of Jewish liberals are working on devising a plan to help Obama win older Jews in Florida.

It's called The Great Schlep, and I have no idea how much of this will actually come to fruition, but the plan is to hit these older Jews where they live by having their grandchildren head down to Florida over Columbus Day Weekend to convince their grandparents to vote for Obama.

"If there is anyone a Jewish grandparent will listen to it's their (brilliant, gorgeous) grandchild," writes the organizer. "TheGreatSchlep.com website will target, engage and activate Jews 18-24 years old - the Facebook generation. A viral internet campaign will allow the Jewish young people, a.k.a. Schleppers, to communicate with and meet other Schleppers. Then, on Columbus Day weekend (October 10-13), Jewish kids from all over the United States will schlep to Florida to spend the weekend with their grandparents, a.k.a. Bubbie and Zadie. Organized dinners at Chinese restaurants, pool parties, rec room discussion groups, etc. will faciliate (sic) intergenerational pro-Obama discussions. The kids will arrive in Florida with the facts about Obama-- facts that will counteract the false rumors many of their grandparents have heard."

Perhaps Rabbi Funnye can be brought on board.

-- jpt

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