It's as simple as that. According to the NY Times, this falls into the category of "the changing practices of the consumer credit industry." 

I get it. Baseball's midsummer classic is a piece of Americana and Barack is President Cool.

Barack Obama will be adding baseball broadcaster to his résumé. SI.com learned Sunday that the President will join Fox Sports announcers Joe Buck and Tim McCarver during Tuesday's All-Star Game. Obama is expected to be in the booth sometime between the third and fifth inning. SI.com reported earlier that the White House was considering Fox Sports' request to interview the President during the game.

As a fellow White Sox fan, I can only hope that the president takes advantage of this opportunity and calls to the nation's attention the travesty of Jermaine Dye's absence from the American League's all-star roster.

But as my grandmother would have undoubtedly said by now: "Genug Shoyn. (Enough Already)"

It is not uncommon for some Jews, especially in the U.S., to refer to their brethren who voice criticism of Israel as "self-hating." This epithet is patently absurd and is a sure sign that the person hurling it has run out of cogent thought. But it is also used to marginalize views unacceptable to the mainstream, or at least as it is defined by AIPAC.

Well, now comes word this morning that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has referred not to Noam Chomsky but to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod as "self-hating Jews." Mark this as the moment this obnoxious term has jumped the shark.   

Been staying away from this story. Don't really care about Michael Jackson. Even watched Kramer v. Kramer last night to avoid hearing about his memorial service. BTW, what performances by Hoffman and Streep.

Then I made the mistake of going on CNN.com and saw that Berry Gordy said "King of Pop" wasn't big enough for MJ. He's really the greatest entertainer that ever lived. "King of the Jews?" Anyway, then I saw some of the celeb names in attendance, and thought OMG, who is turning out for this event? I then wandered onto Drudge and saw an actual list. Lou Ferigno. A finalist from Britain's Got Talent Show or something. Corey Feldman. Levar Burton. I feel much better about our country.

Still, it wouldn't be too awful if a shark would take a nibble (nothing big of course) out of some poor surfer and we could get back to life as we knew it.

It's now the day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech. His speech has received mixed reviews, with at least one somewhat favorable and from an unexpected source. But consider this from Netanyahu's speech:

I told President Obama when I was in Washington that if we could agree on the substance, then the terminology would not pose a problem. And here is the substance that I now state clearly:

If we receive this guarantee regarding demilitirization and Israel's security needs, and if the Palestinians recognize Israel as the State of the Jewish people, then we will be ready in a future peace agreement to reach a solution where a demilitarized Palestinian state exists alongside the Jewish state.

Regarding the remaining important issues that will be discussed as part of the final settlement, my positions are known: Israel needs defensible borders, and Jerusalem must remain the united capital of Israel with continued religious freedom for all faiths. The territorial question will be discussed as part of the final peace agreement. In the meantime, we have no intention of building new settlements or of expropriating additional land for existing settlements.

As I read this excerpt, Bibi is saying, look you want me to call whatever the Palestinians end up with a "state," ok, far be it from to get hung up on terminology. Just don't expect it be a state like any other state, you know, sovereign.

Commenting on Nov. 29, 2008, about a herd of customers rushing a Wal-Mart store for "doorbuster" deals and trampling a store employee to death, I asked how far can the bread lines be. Well, as pointed out in this NY Times article, lines are starting to form in the most unlikeliest of places. People have no savings and huge expenses. This could get really ugly, really fast.

 

    I grew up in Skokie, Illinois. My grandmother, who was one of eight women attorneys admitted to the Wisconsin bar in 1932, tutored me in Hebrew. She was an exacting teacher and half teased and half scolded me that I pronounced "Israel," of all words, like a goy. But I persevered; something in me felt some inexplicable connection to Israel, Artzenu, and the language of our heroic brethren. For a 14 or 15 year old Jewish kid in 1980's Skokie, there really was no other choice than to view Israelis in such terms. And certainly not for one of Mar Hoffman's students at Niles North High School. There, we learned as much about Israel's history, culture and politics as we did about conjugating reflexive verbs. Hitahavti, hitahavta, hitahavt . . . . By the time I landed in Israel for the first time in 1987, at age 22, I was already in love.

    Once on the ground, Israel did not disappoint. Three weeks I spent volunteering on an army base, and five weeks exploring the country from top to bottom. One evening we dropped into a bar in Haifa, and some elderly man turned to us and for no particular reason told us two stories about "Baron Rothschild." The details of the stories are not that important here, though the first ended with the Baron telling two beggars, who had thought they could take advantage of his generosity, that they could scratch each others' backs. The second, with the Baron remarking that he grew up the son of a shoemaker and that his son grew up the son of a Rothschild. Much later on, and when my two girls were little, I would tell them these Rothschild stories as I tucked them into bed at night.

    Yet, my love for Israel was even at that time a mature love. I understood that Israel was not perfect.

    Sleeping one night at a beach on the Kinneret, I heard something that has stuck with me to this day. Young kids were running around the beach late at night. Tired and in my sleeping bag, at first I couldn't quite make out the words. Then I clearly heard "Aravim" [Arabs]. Then I heard the word "Mavet" [Death]. And it soon became clear to me that these kids were chanting "Mavet L'Aravim" [Death to the Arabs]. But at the time, this just seemed an aberration and I remained struck by the Kinneret's quiet beauty. 
            
    From there I spent time at the beaches and bars of Tel Aviv, wandering around Jerusalem, Haifa, Naharyia, Netyana, the Golan, sleeping on the hiking trail leading in toward the Banias waterfalls. Fourth of July in Eilat.

    When I came back home after that summer to begin my second year of law school, I was determined to find a way to return to Israel. And I found a program that combined a kibbutz ulpan program and a clerkship at the Supreme Court of Israel. So after sitting for the bar, I flew to Israel. It was the summer of 1990, shortly after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Scuds would soon be falling on Tel Aviv. It was also the time of Operation Solomon, when Israel flew 15,000 Jews out of Ethiopia. Thousands of immigrants from Russia were still pouring into the country, some of whom I met at Kibbutz Yagur where I spent six months on an uplan program. It is at Kibbutz Yagur that I met Ayelet who took over from my grandmother and Mar Hoffman and introduced me to an Israel I hadn't known. 

    After a year in Israel, I returned home yet again with the plan to pay off my student loans and make aliyah. I exchanged letters with my friends in Israel. And it was Ayelet who told me that my letters read like love letters to Israel. And of course she was right.

    Back in Chicago I met my future wife, had a family, and developed a career. Though I've been back a couple times to Israel since, my dreams of aliyah were never realized. I have had to get along with listening to Galai Tzahal on the internet when I arrive at my office in the morning, by reading Yehoshua, Oz, Segev and Morris, perusing Haaretz, occasionally printing Yoel Marcus's columns in Hebrew for the train ride home, waiting for Broza to play in Chicago, searching You Tube for Einstein's black and white videos, and most recently reading on the internet about Maccabi Tel-Aviv's signing of my all time favorite college basketball player, Dee Brown. 

    At this point I suppose it is only right to disclose my political leanings. Unabashed peacenik I am. A believer in a two state solution, even today with all that's happened. My love for Israel has never been diminished by my criticism of her governments. In fact, it is my love for Israel that informs my criticisms. Still I have been very troubled, no, sick is the right word, as I read about the rise of Avigdor Lieberman and his Israel Beiteinu party. 

    And so it was this morning that I checked out the Haaretz website and read an article reporting on Avigdor Lieberman's popularity among Israeli teens. I have included an excerpt below:

        The youths, ages 16-18, many of them good friends from school, had stood for a long time before the event began at the intersection near the hotel, waving Israeli flags and shouting "Death to the Arabs" and "No loyalty, no citizenship" at passing cars.
              
        In the tent, they deliberate over what to shout when Lieberman enters: Calling out "The next prime minister" may sound a bit presumptuous with regard to the leader of what's likely to be the third-largest party in the next Knesset. But during a week when Yisrael Beiteinu won the highest level of support in mock high-school polls - the sky's the limit.
   

***

        "This country has needed a dictatorship for a long time already. But I'm not talking about an extreme dictatorship. We need someone who can put things in order. Lieberman is the only one who speaks the truth." Adds Edan Ivanov, an 18 year old who describes himself as being "up on current events":
       
        "We've had enough here with the 'leftist democracy' - and I put that term in quotes, don't get me wrong. People have put the dictator label on Lieberman because of the things he says. But the truth is that in Israel there can't be a full democracy when there are Arabs here who oppose it.
       
        "All Lieberman's really saying is that anyone who isn't prepared to sign an oath of loyalty to the state, because of his personal views, cannot receive equal rights; he can't vote for the executive authority. People here are gradually coming to understand what needs to be done concerning a person who is not loyal."
       
        Do these ideas fit with what you're learning in civics lessons?
       
        Ivanov: "In my opinion, school doesn't tell it like it is. In school, you want to get a matriculation certificate, you need the grades, but you don't learn the truth there. The truth you learn from the neighborhood, from the street. I don't mean the street in a negative sense - I mean that you learn the truth from what's happening here."
       
        What's happening here?
       
        "We have a problem: Upper Nazareth is surrounded by minorities. There are lots of incidents with them. Women are scared to walk in the streets, and people are afraid they'll be stabbed. No one knows what to do about it at this point. There are people who live here and during a war they act as a fifth column. It will only be possible to make peace with them after we make war."
       
        Is that why people shout "Death to the Arabs"?
       
        "The people who shout 'Death to the Arabs' - they mean death to those who support terror. There are Druze and Bedouin, too, and we have lots of friends who are minorities and we have no problem with them. By the way, there are also a lot of Arabs who come with us to demonstrations and shout 'Death to the Arabs,' meaning 'death to everyone except me.'" 

    After seeing Lieberman's rise in the polls, after reading this article, I cannot help but conclude that there are fascist winds blowing in Israel. Some winds die out, some gain strength, but that such winds are blowing is no longer in doubt.     

    The article prompted me to cut and paste the above excerpt and email it to my Ayelet, whose daughter now is pen pals with my daughter. Only half jokingly, I commented: "You guys can stay with us if things get really bad."

    I suppose as with most love affairs, you are bound to get your heart broken. I just didn't expect that it would come like this.

    There are now three days left until the election. For me, the election is no longer about war or peace or the Palestinians. It is about the soul of the country I love.    

Still trying to make lemonade from lemons, Iraq War Cheerleader Thomas Friedman writes in this morning's NY Times:

Here's a story you don't see very often. Iraq's highest court told the Iraqi Parliament last Monday that it had no right to strip one of its members of immunity so he could be prosecuted for an alleged crime: visiting Israel for a seminar on counterterrorism. The Iraqi justices said the Sunni lawmaker, Mithal al-Alusi, had committed no crime and told the Parliament to back off.

That's not all. The Iraqi newspaper Al-Umma al-Iraqiyya carried an open letter signed by 400 Iraqi intellectuals, both Kurdish and Arab, defending Alusi. That takes a lot of courage and a lot of press freedom. I can't imagine any other Arab country today where independent judges would tell the government it could not prosecute a parliamentarian for visiting Israel -- and intellectuals would openly defend him in the press.

***

That is the Iraq that Obama is inheriting. It is an Iraq where we have to begin drawing down our troops -- because the occupation has gone on too long and because we have now committed to do so by treaty -- but it is also an Iraq that has the potential to eventually tilt the Arab-Muslim world in a different direction.

I'm sure that Obama, whatever he said during the campaign, will play this smart. He has to avoid giving Iraqi leaders the feeling that Bush did -- that he'll wait forever for them to sort out their politics -- while also not suggesting that he is leaving tomorrow, so they all start stockpiling weapons.

If he can pull this off, and help that decent Iraq take root, Obama and the Democrats could not only end the Iraq war but salvage something positive from it. Nothing would do more to  restore my own reputation enhance the Democratic Party's national security credentials than that.

That Friedman would have advocated an American invasion of Iraq with the goal of democratizing the Arab world was hardly surprising. Some fourteen years before we invaded Iraq, former Columbia University Professor, Edward Said, noted about Friedman's book From Beirut to Jerusalem: "how determined [Friedman] is to be an all knowing White Father composing the ultimate how-to-do-it book for the Middle East."

(I remember Said's observation originally published in The Village Voice, October 17, 1989, and reprinted in Said's Politics of Dispossession largely because Said in the same piece wrote of Friedman "traveling rather ostentatiously across the Lebanese-Israeli border with his golf clubs." Reading From Beirut to Jerusalem I was similarly struck by the dissonant Ugly American tone of Friedman's anecdote about dragging his clubs though Lebanese and Israeli checkpoints.) 

So I guess it is no less surprising that Friedman is still trying to convince people (and I suppose himself) that he was right all along. He'd however have better luck as a groundskeeper in the minefields of Southern Lebanon.

What's the distance between a throng of customers waiting outside a Wal-Mart for "doorbuster" deals and a throng of destitute people waiting in line for bread? 

With the clock ticking on George and Dick, this old bit of news came to mind:

The energy services company that Dick Cheney served for much of the last five years as chairman and chief executive has agreed to let Mr. Cheney, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, retire with a package worth an estimated $20 million, according to people who have reviewed the deal.

New York Times, August 12, 2000 (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9502EEDE123FF931A2575BC0A9669C8B63)

To steal a line from Condi, no one could have predicted . . .

On the op-ed pages of this morning's NY Times: Donald Rumsfeld and Ahmad Chalabi. Maybe the Times can get a pardon from Bush for its recidivism.

(Links intentionally omitted. Your time is better spent reading about yesterday's Northwestern's 27-10 victory over the Fighting Illini. http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/college/illinois/chi-23-brite-illinoisnov23,0,5768733.story)   

Obama should pull the plug on Hillary. What's with all the maneuvering? And what "concessions" does Bill have to offer? Dealing with the Clintons is impossible. She may be a good fit for the job, but so are lots of people. Send her back to the Senate and move on. I'm tired of these people.

Isn't it long passed the time we stopped using the title "[fill in the blank] Czar" to refer to the person being assigned to tackle whatever urgent issue he or she is supposed to tackle. Based on the success rates of past "Czars," my optimism about the future of health care is waning by the moment.

Let's ditch the title and just address the problem. Or least come up with a new title that doesn't reek of abject failure (or past p.r. ploys). Caesar or Pharaoh, perhaps?

For those of you suffering clinical symptoms of campaign withdrawal, I have just the fix for you, an electoral equivalent of methadone. Won't give you the same "Yes We Can" high, but should provide you with a target for your righteous indignation and get you through inauguration day. And it comes complete with a contemptible character known for his own Rovian knack for sucking the meaning out of just about any word. Elections in Israel are set for February 10, 2009.

The two leading parties are the Likud, headed by former Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, and Kadima, headed by current Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. The big issue? Peace talks with the Palestinians.

And go:

"Netanyahu does not want to halt talks, but he believes it's premature to talk about a final peace deal, and sharing control of Jerusalem is out of the question," Libster said.

Instead, he thinks talks with the Palestinians should focus on developing their economy, with political matters to be discussed only after economic conditions on the ground improve. "Economic peace has to come first," she said.

Any rational observer will tell you that Netanyahu's position is a non-starter, and would halt the very talks his spokeswoman says he does not want to halt.

Economic peace? I knew Bibi wouldn't let me down.

Let's cut it out now. I enthusiastically supported Barack Obama, I voted for him, I shed tears when CNN announced at 10:00 p.m.CST on Nov. 4 that he had won. I even ran the NYC Marathon two days before the election wearing an Obama t-shirt, an experience that I will never ever forget.

But seriously, I don't care where the Obama children go to school, or where the family attends religious services. Not in a negative way, but in a "it's not my business" kind of way.

While the inane media coverage is obviously nothing new, I'm finding it even more infuriating when the silliness is focused on my guy.

Come'on Barack, help me out! Announce a firm pull out date from Iraq!