A cost effective approach to health care: Dozens of rabbis and Kabbalah mystics armed with ceremonial trumpets took to the skies over Israel on Monday to battle the swine flu virus, according to local media reports. About 50 Jewish holy men chanted prayers and blew shofars (ritual rams’ horns) in an aircraft circling over the country in the hope of stopping the spread of the virus, some of those involved...

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the younger sister of the late President John F. Kennedy who founded the Special Olympics and promoted it to the very depths of her soul, has died at 88. As someone who used to write obituaries as part of my stint as a staff reporter on two newspapers (the old Wichita Eagle in Wichita, Kansas and the San Diego Union in San Diego, CA) I know full well the “boilerplate” obits...

I am never surprised by the ignorance of many people, but some expressions of stupidity sometimes amaze me. I find it difficult to swallow when some Americans compare any U.S. elected official they oppose to Chancellor Adolph Hitler of Germany’s Third Reich. Many years ago, a few on the left suggested that of President Bush but most mainstream Democrats publicly repudiated the connection. Now some prominent...

I wrote my living will yesterday rather than posting my column. It served a myriad of purposes, the least of which gave the gatekeeper a day off fending those slings and arrows from both extremes of the political spectrum picking apart my prose and carrying on about stuff I didn’t write nor intend but rather squabbling among themselves over some intangible twist introduced by gremlins commenting on that...

Baitullah Mehsud, 35, chief of Pakistan’s Taliban umbrella group, Tehrik-i-Taliban, was killed in a CIA missile strike inside Pakistan. Pakistan’s foreign minister says intelligence sources have confirmed Mehsud’s death, reports Voice of America. Pakistani intelligence officers said that the militant commander, blamed for dozens of suicide bombings, including the fatal attack against the former...

We have several posts that look at the increasingly ugly health care town halls amid allegations that they are being spurred on by special interests opposed to health care reform and polarizing talk show hosts and often involve the prevention of discussion rather than spirited discussion or debate. To others, the groups genuinely represent anger and frustration at President Barack Obama and his proposed policies. Here’s...

Lilly and Ludwig Friedman on their wedding day, Jan. 27, 1946. Introduction: I received this touching article via e-mail a couple of months ago. A note at the end of the e-mail says: In MEMORIAM – 63 YEARS LATER It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the six million Jews,...

FOR THOSE WHO CAME, BUT COULD NOT STAY While you and I were being born, growing “in the little bread oven”… as it was often said back then… there were other little babies across the world, suddenly thrust into real ovens, and they were not allowed to grow any more. Don’t tell me that that is the past and none of our concern. This is in cellular memory, and we are here to make certain that...

Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been sworn in to be Iran’s President again — beginning his second term seen by many in Iran and even more abroad as someone who has been put into power by the country’s power elite via a rigged election. Here’s a Reuters video report:

If these affidavits, filed in federal court yesterday by two former Blackwater employees, are true, the founder and owner of the biggest security contracting company in Iraq during the previous administration  is not just a felon, but a psychopath:

UPDATE: Miss Ling and Miss Lee are said to be aboard an aeroplane along with Bill Clinton, heading for California where their families await them. Yay. Safe journey to all. ….. But, the feat is not Bill Clinton’s alone. Here is today’s article about how Miss Ling’s sister, well known journalist Lisa Ling used the polite form of apology and supplication publicly to ask North Korea to...

Linda Douglass, the White House communications director for health care reform, gives the facts in response to the current GOP dirty war against Pres. Obama’s health care reform package.

Is Iran’s theocracy imploding? Jamsheed Choksy — Professor of Iranian Studies and former Director of the Middle Eastern Studies Program at Indiana University, and a member of the US National Council on the Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities — makes the case that it is in this MUST READ on RealClearWorld. Here’s a small part of the beginning: Swept up by revolutionary...

I want to see all rabbis, priests, ministers, imams, and other spiritual leaders publicly denounce this murderous attack on a group of gay teenagers and their friends. No matter what you think of homosexuality, we can all agree that shooting children is a grossly inappropriate way of expressing one’s opinion. If the shooter is a Jew (not yet determined), he did not get the message of Tisha Bav (Jewish...

As noted below, the WaPo described President Obama’s candidates for the Presidential Medal of Freedom as not “particularly controversial”. Aside from the points MK raised about Ted Kennedy, it’s worth noting that Desmond Tutu isn’t exactly a stranger to controversy either. Wikipedia reports that Tutu has persistently compared Israel to apartheid South Africa, called on Jews to...

UPDATE: J POST: Three people were killed and 14 people were wounded – two seriously, three moderately and the rest lightly – in a shooting at the Bar Noir, a center for youth run by the Tel Aviv gay community, on Saturday night. ============================================================== Ynetnews: 2 killed in Tel Aviv shooting GLBT activist says shooting that killed 2, wounded 10 at gay community...

In Chinese astrology 2009 is the “Year of the Ox”. Only that person or a nation, it is said, would remain unscathed if it works its backside off this year. US president Barack Obama was born in the “Year of the Ox”, and his nose is tied to the grindstone. But he might just work out some miracles…provided his countrymen share his burden instead of nitpicking. Among various alternatives...

Her first name, Corazon, means Heart, her last name, Aquino, is often a name still bestowed in honor of the theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, a doctor of the church who was known for his down to earth rhetoric such as this one I recall from childhood Catholic school: God’s thought is pure, but it has to be passed through mud: Us. They called her Cory affectionately and she ruled for 6 years during which...

If a new Kos/Research2000 poll is correct, the Republican party — the once-proud party of thoughtful, policy-oriented conservatives such as Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan – could be morphing into the “birther party.” Why does this matter? Because there needs to be at least a modicum of consensus in American politics and the birthers — egged on by conservative...

Let me share my random thoughts…When lust takes center stage, the thinking and rational behaviour flies out of the window. We live in a promiscuous age/world where America provides, apart from huge arms and war material, 80 per cent of pornography world-wide. Now a question: Why is the USA pumping so much money in Afghanistan? It looks more like a case where a love-lorn or lust-stricken person puts at...

Dahlia Lithwick, a contributing editor to Newsweek and senior editor at Slate, is a brilliant Constitutional lawyer and scholar who has written extensively on the United States Supreme Court and on the Court’s cases and opinions. No wonder she has been intensely focused on what impact the recent elections will have on the composition of our country’s highest court. In fact, Lithwick was pondering...

Shiva Limbo by Brian Blum The most disconcerting thing about my trip to the U.S. for my father’s funeral was the “pre-shiva” period (known in Hebrew as aninut). Shiva is the seven days stipulated by Jewish tradition for mourning following burial. My father died on a Sunday. But the funeral didn’t take place until Wednesday. The official reason was that it took time to process all the paperwork. The...

Unfortunately for Iran’s Christians, post-election protesting and riots over vote fraud have resulted in increased suspicion and persecution. According to this article by Dr. Wahied Wahdat-Hagh, writing for Germany’s Rheinischer Merkur newspaper, efforts are afoot in Iran’s parliament to alter the nation’s legal code to impose the death penalty on people who convert to Christianity....

We may have recently elected a President who is a young, mixed-race natural-born U.S. citizen, but the political and economic power of this country still rests with a few thousand rich old white guys (ROWGs) born well before 1960. If one looks at the U.S. Senate, less than a dozen of these guys are making most of the decisions on how to run the U.S. – all the while principally representing the wealthiest...

I will come right out and say it. No federal funding for abortion procedures should be stipulated in the healthcare legislation now being deliberated in Congress. It pains me to say that because on principle I am pro-choice. The decision should rest with the doctor and the woman, the father, perhaps the pastor and definitely not the government. I realize this position is contradictory because it penalizes women...