If you don't want the government to do anything, then you have to argue that the government has nothing to do.  If there is a lasting public responsibility to repair the damage inflicted upon the African-American community by centuries of discrimination, that would require government intervention.  Since, libertarians don't want government intervention (especially not in a broad-based race neutral effort to properly fund public education, health care and job retraining) there must be no duty to African-Americans.  So, the good libertarian response is to mandate historical amnesia or a statute of limitations on racial grievances. 

All of this makes perfect sense so long as you don't actually visit the South Side of Chicago or North Philadelphia or Roxbury and see the very real scars that racism has left.  Clinton or Obama will at least try to implement policies that will help heal these scars.  No major Republican politician (other than the economically challenged Jack Kemp) has indicated that they even care.  

This seems to be an adolescent response to the right-wing Jewish attack machine.  This would piss Morton Klein and David Horowitz off - so let's do it.  If you want to be really transgressive, why not print a Jewcy for Nader T-shirt - lets back the one candidate who not only is actively anti-Israel but also managed to hand Bush the White House for 8 years.  

I certainly get why Obama is the "Jewcy" approved candidate.  He's hip, he's multicultural.   Like Jewcy, the Obama campaign takes image and branding seriously and understands that hipsters need their substance delivered to them when they're not looking - the way that Jessica Seinfeld's cookbook delivers vegetables to kids.  But there's plenty of hip Jews already supporting Obama.  Obama-kahs are already on the market and they truly can't be improved upon when it comes to kosher Obama swag.

Jewcy should stick to a serious discussion of the issues around Jewish anxiety (real or manufactured) towards Obama.  Getting writers like Ali Eteraz to comment about how American Muslims respond to the defense against the "Obama is a crypto-Mulsim" "slur" offers a fresh and important perspective.    A Che-style T-shirt with rays of light gleaming from Obama with a Jewish star tacked on is on the other hand tacky and cliche.

What's really amazed me is that Daniel Pipes has sunk to such a low level, that he now occupies the gutter. Of course, he's the guy who just wrote an article suggesting Israel "give Gaza back" to Eqypt. Not that he's consulted with the Egyptians

Really, of all the things Pipes has written, this bothers you?  Having Egypt take responsibility for keeping rockets flying out of Gaza may be a bad idea - but the alternatives are pretty horrific. (1) Hamas is the one firing the rockets to begin with - and plans on doing so until it achieves its objective - namely the end of Israel; (2) Fatah couldn't even keep itself from getting kicked out of Gaza, and wasn't particularly interested in sticking its neck out to stop the rockets from firing when it was in Gaza;  (3) Israeli re-occupation would involve IDF patrols of Gaza City, which no Palestinian or Israeli should want and (4) NATO soldiers would simply be a magnet for suicide bombers until they went home. 

That pretty much leaves finding someone with the incentive and capacity for keeping the rockets from getting fired.  Do you have a better candidate for that role than Egypt?

And in the rest of the post, he does those very things.

I'm not sure you read my comments clearly.  The first paragraph summed up the Koffler-Hamburger thesis, not my own.  I explicitly reject the idea that simply because right-wing hatchet jobs against Obama include Israel as part of the litany of smears against Obama that all criticism of Obama's advisers on Israel are smears.  Which is precisely the position you took earlier in this thread. 

The rest of my post is neither contradictory nor an attempt to score cheap debating points.  I meant what I said - let's discuss where the candidates stand on the substantive issues on US-Israeli policy, rather than throwing around charges of anti-Semitism and counter-charges of smearing opponents as anti-Semites. 

Obama's Muslim background,  in any way you look at it can have a very bad influence on the situation in the middle east, in favour of the Arab world.

Obama's Muslim "background" consists of (1) a middle name; (2) a grandfather who he never met who converted to Islam; and (3) a couple of years living in Indonesia.  Obama was raised a-religious and has been a practicing Christian for decades.  (A middle name is not the same thing a "background."  My middle name is Howard.  However, I have no background hosting ABC's Wide World of Sports or giving play-by-play in the Ali-Frazier fights.)

Despite this critical factual error, I'm not sure what your thesis is.  It seems to be that electing someone with an Arabic middle name will somehow embolden radical Islamists and America's other enemies.  This is an even more absurd argument than the idea that electing someone with an Arabic middle name will put a significant dent in anti-Americanism in the Islamic world.     

Obama's foreign policy record is certainly not as developed as Clinton or McCain's, but it exists.  Any analysis of a future Obama Administration's foreign policy agenda should be based on his record, his public statements and his likely appointments, not idle speculation as to whether his middle name will bring or doom world peace.  

Ah, the cliche of the "serious" music fan turning their nose up at Billy Joel. I see the requisite dismissive comparison with Elvis Costello is included. (Apparently, I missed the memo about having to choose to like one or the other.) However, the idea that Joel's work is a "recreation" is a new, and pretty hard to support considering that Costello's first album, My Aim Is True, came out in the summer of 1977, only months before The Stranger, Joel's fifth studio album.

If you don't like "Christmas in Fallujah", just turn the dial to some other, likely worse pop Christmas song.  I'm sure some station at this very moment is playing "Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime", which after is all, was written by half of the best songwriting duo of all time.

And for the record, I have never lived in either county of Long Island.

There's a significant difference between keeping a back-channel open with Hamas and inviting them to a international peace conference.  How exactly are Abbas and Fayyad supposed to sell the virtues of moderation to Palestinians on the fence if Hamas reaps the same diplomatic rewards while retaining its rejectionism? 

<blockquote> Thanks to Michael D. Fein for pointing out a key, er, point, which I forgot to make: that we, the west, cannot claim to be supporting or promoting democracy in the Middle East and then ignore the results when we don't like them. </blockquote>

This is a ridiculous statement.  Are democratic governments exempt from the consequences of their foreign policies simply because their leaders were elected in relatively fair and free elections?  If Turkey invaded Kurdistan, should US simply stand by because, after all, Turkey's leaders were elected in free and fair elections.  If heaven forbid, Avigdor Lieberman became PM of Israel, would you make the same argument no matter what policies he promoted?  Hamas was given an opportunity to despite its opposition to Oslo, join the peace process.   Instead it continued to reject Israel and therefore has face diplomatic sanction.  (Compare this to the way Bibi, despite Likud's prior rejection of Palestinian nationalism, continued the Oslo process.)   The next time Palestinians have elections they will understand that there is a downside to electing a party with a hard-line foreign policy.  

I've been convinced - I'm adopting the Israeli practice.  Praying for rain in Israel, I understand.  Praying for rain based on a date that is nearly two weeks after it is convenient for Iraqi crops no sense.   Does anyone really think that if the Rabbis who established this rule were brought (ala Moses to Rabbi Akiva's classroom) that they would want us to use the December 4th date?  After all, they applied the best understanding of science at that time.  It is precisely because the rabbis were good at math that they would have undoubtedly revised their ruling upon greater understanding.

When it comes to gender, progressive halakhic Jews are willing to subject halakhic rules to intense scrutiny.  Why is it that for everything else the answer is simply to do things as we've always done them, regardless of whether it makes any sense even within the internal logic of Jewish tradition?

Actually, Osama could not appreciate Hanukah, because he could not endorse how we remember and commemorate the events of the Maccabee revolt.  Rather than celebrate martyrdom and war, the Rabbis placed the focus of the holiday on non-violent, spiritual renewal.  The Rabbis were well aware of all the problems the author points out, which is why he decided to exclude these books from the Jewish biblical canon (and why Mel Gibson made noises of making a Maccabee film).

There is insightful revisionism, and then there is the type that simply proves that black is white and gets you run over at the next zebra crossing.  This is the latter. 

Its an excellent speech, particularly because it addresses Federation's most pressing need - which is how to remain relevant in an era of de-centralization.  If all goes well, you'll get a lot of questions as to what a hosted content management system is.

At the heart of your proposal is essentially the message to Federation that rather than fighting the changes in Jewish philanthropy, it needs to get out in front of them.   The two most likely criticisms that I imagine are the following.  (1) Federation has always utilized the returns to scale that derive from centralized philanthropy.  Won't diffused micro-lending inhibit the Jewish communities ability to make significant policy decisions?   (2) What about market failures?  How do we ensure that necessary, but unsexy communal needs like senior centers get funded? 

I imagine that your likely answer to the first question is that's pretty much the point - centralized decision-making is what got the Jewish community into its current mess to begin with.  However, the second critique is harder to glide over and needs to be addressed.