I tweeted something about how insufferable Amy Sohn — whose tenure at New York Press, alas, did not intersect with mine, but about whom I once held very strong opinions regardless! — is in this video, particularly for slighting Jewel’s affection for Charles Bukowski, as this is evidently 1997. And then this happened: The whole [...]

Now, in fairness, I’m a very short Jew, so, it’s not like this thought hasn’t occurred to me either. But my friend Ari Rabin-Havt is a perfectly tall American of Jewish heritage, and the demagogic buffoon Glenn Beck mispronounces Ari’s eeeeeeethnicky last name in order to make some juvenile jokes about Hobbits. Because real Americans [...]

Steve Walt has a useful primer on why military occupations generate so much visceral hatred from those who live under them. It may be a bit basic to most readers, but elite foreign-affairs audiences may not think too closely about the issue, so it’s a positive contribution. But I think it goes wrong in at [...]

Adam Serwer demolishes a talking point: What the articles on the subject all seem to omit is that there will be no TV cameras in the courtroom for this trial. Khalid Sheik Mohammed‘s rants will be available only by transcript. Americans, to the extent they aren’t bored to tears, will get to experience KSM’s pontificating [...]

Get ready for a lot more Palinesque observations that “more and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead.” She’s palling around with extremist preachers. The Jewish alliance with Christian Zionism… I mean, it’s just a cynical form of self-hatred. These are people who will do everything [...]

Godwin’s Law gets turned up to 11 in the inter-Shtetl food fight. Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate who opposes a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, funds a pro-Netanyahu sheet called Israel Hayom that runs the following dreck about progressive Jews like moi who support J Street: “Soon they will be heating the ovens [...]

Laura Rozen flags a passage from Maziar Bahari’s account of imprisonment after the Iranian uprising that would be hilarious if it wasn’t nauseating. Here’s Bahari describing Iranian intelligence’s laser-like focus on The Daily Show: Only a few weeks earlier, hundreds of foreign reporters had been allowed into the country in the run-up to the election. [...]

And the results are up on her excellent radio show’s internetpage. We’re talking about Afghanistan. I suggest listening to this while looking at the accompanying picture of my beloved dog Kingsley and his pal Tchoppi the camera-hog, hanging out in Baltimore and nursing Sikki Nixx back to health after she shattered her leg playing rollerderby.

Back when I worked at a magazine I don’t work for anymore, I attended an off-the-record luncheon with Joe Lieberman, in which he made his case to the magazine’s staff about why he should be president. I don’t honestly know what my obligations are at this point as far as respecting the ground rules. But [...]

Needed: jobs programs in Pakistan. Now now now. Economic opportunities needed yesterday. Access to U.S. markets needed years ago. You know that old Ghost lyric, “I shoulda stayed in job corps“? Some of that, combined with the interrogation debriefs from the LET operatives who pulled off Mumbai — shown in a great new HBO documentary; [...]