But in any event, you would have to go a long way to convince me that Pastor John Hagee maintains his former stature after the embarassment he caused Candidate McCain last year, and as AIPAC goes, it is visibly shrinking beside the upstart liberal lobbies like J Street and APN. Check out this James Besser column....

Then there’s this line: “As you all are familiar with other ‘Pro-Israel’ organizations such as J St, APN, and others; their pressure on Congress is being felt and is making these signatures harder for us to get.”

‘nuf said. How long do you suppose it will take J Street to put that in a fundraising letter?

I don't know if there were other fisticuffs but one commentator said the fine supporters of liberty should be proud, they knocked down a disabled woman. Don't know whose side the writer was excoriating.

I would like to think of that as a sarcastic comment by said commentator, but who knows anymore? And Lord knows, it's a shame the way sarcasm and irony are lost on wingnuts anyway.

I should probably write a book about it... but I guess I decided not to do that when I left academia.

There continue to be many promising technological advances in the field of self-publishing.

So why can't the folks who work for the parent networks do reporting like this guy did?

I know! I know! It's because the cable and network news desks do not operate in the broader public interest, but rather in the interests of the private shareholders of their parent companies and whose dividends depend on the advertising revenues generated by the same industry that is bankrolling the town hall disruptions.

The two state solution is an essential first step toward a binational solution...

That is a most healthy outlook. In a practical sense, I see this emerging first economically, followed by culturally and ultimately politically. Further, so much could be accomplished if the Arab League could bring itself -- and the collective will of its 22 member states -- to exponentially raise the viability of its Beirut Initiative with the relatively risk-free good faith gesture of formally lifting the economic, cultural and political boycott of Israel. If there is any party to the conflict that can raise the confidence and self-esteem of both the Israeli and Palestinian electorates with a metaphorical flick of the wrist, I sincerely believe it is the Arab League. Likewise, it can allow the conflict to smolder and sputter along by its own trepidation, ambivalence and paralysis -- even moreso than the United States.

Further, for those who are interested in more domestic trouble and strife, I highly recommend Kaplan's An Empire Wilderness. It's ten years old by now, but that doesn't diminish its readability. Equally compelling for what it gets wrong as what it got right.

I become especially perplexed about this when the Russian Jew grounds his right to live there in a hypothetical ancestor that left the area centuries ago, all the while ignoring that the Palestinian man he is displacing is likely the descendant of that ancient ancestor's own sister who stayed.

In other words, I am really skeptical that "entire peoples" can be understood to have any rights to occupy any land anywhere. Individuals have rights, not "entire peoples."

An interesting exercise in likelihoods and hypotheticals aside, the circumstance is hardly peculiar to Jews, the Jewish people and Israel. You may even be an American of Italian descent and, having never even set foot in Europe, you most likely would still qualify for Italian citizenship. The tragedy of the Israeli-Arab conflict is precisely that there is a conflict and not, I submit, that there is an Israel.

There are Jews who are indigenous to Ethiopia, Jews who are indigenous to Argentina, Jews who are indigenous to Canada (etc)....

You are conflating individuals with entire peoples. When you do that you will find Greeks who are indigenous to Chicago, Arabs who are indigenous to Detroit, Irish who are indigenous to Boston, and Mexicans who are indigenous to Los Angeles; and then it will become necessary to delegitimize Greece, Ireland, Mexico and all 22 member nations of the League of Arab States. But that will be your load, and good luck with it.

I'm not your monkey. You got mythbuster for that.