The Evolving Jew

" I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood. "

This is a nonpartisan message: GO OUT & VOTE if you haven't already. And vote all the way down the ballot. Democracy means a balance of power between the judiciary, legislature, and the presidency, with similar breakdowns on the state & local levels. Living and participating in a democracy means much more than voting for President. Vote for congress, senate, judges, state representatives, ballot initiatives, etc. If you're not sure who and what will be on your ballot, spend a few minutes on the web, research the issues & candidates, write down your choices, and then go to the ballot booth and register those choices.

I’m taking a brief break on my moratorium of all things political to write down some thoughts that crystallized over Shabbat and try to convince wavering voters who are supporters of Israel that Barack Obama will be better for Israel than John McCain. It basically boils down to this. To paraphrase the traditional political question “Are you better off than you were 4 or 8 years ago”, I’m asking: Is Israel more secure than she was 8 years ago, when that “great friend of Israel” George W Bush came into office? Before Bush there was no peace and Israel’s enemies hated her. But the existential threat was kept to a relative minimum. Then Bush, with John McCain’s wholehearted support, attacked Iraq, destabilizing the Middle East. The big winner? Iran and its madman president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran may have been developing nuclear weapons before Iraq was removed as a rival, but the program accelerated afterwards. Iran’s influence and power in the region were kept in check by the ba...

I heard Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico speak this morning at an Obama campaign event near my city. He's a funny and engaging speaker, but without a lot of fire. He told a funny story and I filmed most of it. I'll set up the clip: He said that the first time he realized the character of Barack Obama was at one of the early debates, when he was still in the primary. He was next to Obama and since there were so many candidates he didn't get a lot of questions, especially since so many of the questions went to Obama and Clinton. So after he was asked a question, he didn't always pay full attention to the follow up since he figured it wouldn't be his turn again for a few minutes. But in this case, it didn't turn out that way and he didn't know what he was supposed to answer. In case you couldn't make out what he said Obama whispered to him, it was " They asked you about Katrina!" I got a chance to meet Richardson afterwards and got...

I usually don’t comment on politics on this blog, but in this political season, and with politics being my version of sports, I guess it’s inevitable. In this Jerusalem Post op-ed piece , Jonathan Tobin decries that the Democratic Party, by veering sharply towards the left, has forced people like Joe Lieberman to turn to the republicans and endorse John McCain. Tobin repeats the usual claim of the right that the Democratic party has become soft on terror and is now controlled by the radical anti-Israel pacifist left and that people like Lieberman have no choice but to lean towards the “responsible” foreign policy of the Republicans. "At places like Huffingtonpost.com and other sites where the MoveOn.org crowd congregate, the comments range from the scatological to the purely anti-Semitic. At such places, hard core anti-Bush and anti-war sentiments are the coin of the realm, and hostility to Israel and its perceived influence on American foreign policy is rampant. The notion of...