Our traditional, if recently inaugurated practice, has been to hand out diamonds and coals to the best and worst newspaper opinion pieces of the week, and the week of April 13 had no shortage of candidates for either nod.

On the bad ideas front, Charles Krauthammer didn't disappoint, making the case that multilateral non-proliferation policy ought to be abandoned because, he says, it has failed in North Korea and Iran --- a case that might be more compelling if (a) there actually were an outcome in either case, (b) people like Krauthammer hadn't spent seven years slandering advocates of multilateralism while defending an administration determined to ensure the failure of negotiations by absenting the US from them, and (c) Krauthammer weren't literally arguing that building a near-perfect missile defense shield ("say, 90 percent" successful, because 100 percent is just pie-in-the-sky, right?) is a hard-nosed, realistic alternative to diplomacy.

Michael O'Hanlon resumed his role as the Washington Post's go-to-guy for arguments for staying in Iraq recycled from late 2004 and unconvincing even then. O'Hanlon and co-author Ann Gildroy point to six unsolved problems which demand that the US continue the occupation at least until 2010, without providing any reason to believe that an extra year of occupation will resolve any of them, or even make progress toward their resolution. Nor do they give any signs of recognition that in the absence of a logical or causal relation between a continued occupation and improved conditions in Iraq, merely listing bad things in Iraq doesn't make a case for staying there.

There were good op-eds too, like Philip Stephens on Silvio Berlusconi, Steve Chapman on the presidential candidates' misguided energy policies, and David Boaz on the quiet, troubling paternalism of the Senate Finance Committee; and rather say anymore about them, I'll advise you to go ahead and read them yourself.

That's because this week was not like all other weeks in editorializing, because this was the week a presidential candidate was discovered to be a non-lapel pin-wearing, non-flag-saluting unrepentant ex-member of the Nation of Islam chapter of the Weather Underground. And even worse, he is a graduate of not one but two Ivy League Schools. Worst of all, he held a fundraiser in San Francisco. And what incalculable arrogance must he have, to think such a traitorous background would not and ought not be the central focus of the election. Fortunately, a crack squad of red-blooded professional journalists, one of whom once almost calloused a finger under the awesome strain of twice-weekly typing, rose up in a chorus stretching from the rust-sodden abandoned factories of Central Park West from 59th St. to 81st, to the polluted crumbling efficiency housing of Murray Hill (where an honest man could earn a living for his family in the rubber and chemical plants until outsourcing came), to the rustic prairie settlements of Woodley Park in Washington whence gunsmiths' workshops line the way to the lambskin prayer tents of Foggy Bottom and the coal mines of Georgetown.

Long lives shaped by the hard and painful experience of toiling sunup to sundown in sweat and soot and muck and stale sour air choking down near lung-fulls of water in the boiling humid misery of July and scavenging for sources of warmth --- chemical fires, manure heaps, abandoned mineshafts --- to fend off the frostbitten terror of January, with a brief reprieve coming once a week on Sunday, the Lord's day, had taught these paladins of plebianism what matters to real Americans like themselves. They could not, as patriots, allow an elitist snob from Hawaii (where is that anyway? France?), who's only gotten where he is by having the great good fortune of being the half-black son of a poor white single mother, to talk down to the salt of the earth folk who've made this land the greatest and freest in the world. No, it was up to them, the town criers of Mainstreet USA, to name and extol the values of the ordinary man, which consist, exclusively and universally, in hunting, Jesus, monolingualism, fingernail dirt, vaginal intercourse in the dark, and cheese from a can. Nor did our heroes have any need of even a single empirical datum, wretched in its loneliness, to support their claims: Any alleged members of the working class who reports beliefs and concerns that don't jibe with say, David Brooks' intuitions about their beliefs and concerns, are most likely crypto-elitists who fooled the survey-takers, and if not, are clearly suffering from false consciousness.

Either that, or a bunch of rich elitists afflicted by guilt about their own prosperity and treacly nostalgia for a past that never was, have constructed and dwell in internally consistent Don Quixote fantasy worlds in which they are the champions of a working class that exists only in their heads --- hence the lack of need ever to consult with the working class that actually exists. Or: Very, very lazy people with column space to fill republished twenty year old pieces with the names changed and a few updated references thrown in.

Here, then, are the week's top five most fatuous editorial responses to the word "bitter." Contenders are judged on a half point graded scale from 0-10, in three categories: freedom from contamination by evidence; obliviousness to the irony of writing about middle Americans as if they're animals in a zoo; and resemblance of style, content, and standards of honesty to a College Republicans flier. Highest cumulative score wins.

Honorable Mentions: Jonah Goldberg, LA Times, April 15, who observes that Barack Obama's character, like everything else in the world, is best explained by tv shows Goldberg watched as a kid. Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal, April 17, argues promisingly that the election will turn on "moral values," but misses out on the top five by citing statistics (albeit ones irrelevant to the case he's trying to make). Ex-Mark Penn partner Douglas Schoen, Washington Post, April 16, thinks Hillary Clinton finally has the opening she needs to start running a negative campaign; right idea, wrong kind of reality-free cocoon for this contest.

5. David Broder, Washington Post, April 17. Saddling up and riding into Pennsyltucky, notepad in hand, to observe the strange folkways of the aboriginals is a standard move for Broder. The Jane Goodall of 15th St. NW reports back that some people in Pennsylvania are planning to vote for Barack Obama, whereas others are not. The judges commend Broder for confusing anecdotes with data, but are unable to award many points considering that his competition didn't even bother assembling uninformative evidence. But he should take heart in having blazed the trails for younger generations of scribes to depress our national standards of discourse. The judges were disappointed that Broder engaged in no obvious partisan hackery, especially with the treasure-trove of quotes from ordinary people from which he could easily have spun several weeks' worth of factually unsupported bullshit.

Score: 3.5, 10.0, 0.5, 14.0 cumulative.

4. David Brooks, New York Times, April 18. "[V]oters want a president who basically shares their values and life experiences. Fairly or not, they look at symbols like Michael Dukakis in a tank, John Kerry’s windsurfing or John Edwards’s haircut as clues about shared values," and there is of course no causal relationship between median voter impressions about candidates and obsessive coverage of haircuts, sandwich filling preferences, and scurrilous rumors about disloyalty to America. A Philadelphia Daily News poll showed 54.5% of viewers of the ABC news debate rated the moderators' performances "terrible," and another 26.9% "disappointing," but that must be wrong because David Brooks has access to the Platonic form of the voter, and the Platonic form of the voter congratulates George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson for asking questions that matter to him, like whether Barack Obama believes in the flag. The judges give Brooks high marks for a sweeping generalization on voters at once pristine in its lack of evidentiary support and downright adorable in its self-unaware, zoological understanding of Americans. Bonus points for ripping on the Trinity United Church of Christ in a paragraph ostensibly about the trendy academic limousine liberal environs of Obama's home in Hyde Park, which is --- let me try to make a local comparison --- a bit like mentioning a black church in Tremont in an essay on Riverdale. (Given Brooks' Chicago background, it's hard to imagine this was an honest mistake.) Subsequently assaying a bit of survey data denies him a perfect score, though Brooks, did, encouragingly, base his analysis on an elementary inductive fallacy.† But the judges must subtract points for earnestness, as well as a depth of insight that, though shallow, still outstrips his competition.

Score: 8.5, 7.0, 2.0, 17.5 cumulative.

3. George Will, Washington Post, April 15, 2008. Who better to deliver a self-righteous sermon on liberals' condescension toward ordinary people than a bowtied Anglophilic fop? And what more reliable, and completely cliche-free predictor of the upcoming election could there be than Michael Barone's reflections on the Eisenhower-Stevenson contests? Here are two hypotheses about why Stevenson lost: (1) He was an out of touch elitist egghead. (2) He was running against the most popular man in the world. Here are two hypotheses about what year it is: (1) 1956. (2) 2008. Will could scarcely have impressed the judges more, and only the extraordinary strength of the field denied him better than a bronze medal.

Score: 8.0, 9.0, 5.5, 22.5 cumulative.

2. Maureen Dowd, New York Times, April 16, 2008. The sun will rise, the tides will come in, the seasons will change, objects at rest will stay at rest, objects in motion will stay in motion, gravity will pull masses towards the center of the earth, and Maureen Dowd's next NYT column will be a vacuous display of pop-psychology and vain self-flattery masquerading as conventional wisdom masquerading as political analysis. David Hume warns us that there is no rational basis for our confidence that these observed past regularities in nature will persist into the unobserved future, but we live our lives assuming that they will, and so far, they have. That Dowd's presence among the Times' staff columnists is so perplexing to intellectuals just goes to show how out of touch they are with real Americans --- real Americans like Dowd, who will never forget the small-town values she was raised on in Washington, DC, no matter how long she lives in Manhattan. (Each locale far, far away from San Francisco, which Dowd aptly describes as "elitism's epicenter.") To say that Dowd wins perfect marks for presenting zero evidence and for obliviousness is plodding redundancy. No Maureen Dowd column is ever ultimately about anything other than the inner states of Maureen Dowd, a cozy land of imagination whose borders she gives no evidence of having ever traversed.

Score: 10.0, 10.0, 5.5, 25.5 cumulative

1. Bill Kristol, New York Times, April 14, 2008. It's probably fitting that a man whose other job is "editing" a magazine that scarcely ever fails to set a new weekly standard for tactical Leninism would "write" a column whose only point and purpose is explicit red-baiting.†† But what makes Kristol's latest offering transcend the boundaries of your run-of-the-mill slanderous hit job and move into the realm of surrealist performance art is that he (1) brags about teaching The Marx-Engels Reader at Penn in a piece (2) bashing elitism and (3) getting misty-eyed about "small-town, working class voters" while (4) somehow managing to confuse with meaning of "bourgeois" with "proletarian" before (5) climaxing with the disclaimer that the same sentiment that Obama expressed, coming out of the mouth of a war hero (are there any running this year?) would not constitute Marxism but simply "an unattractive but in a sense understandable hauteur" --- precisely the sort of phrase precisely that small-town working-class bourgeois voters look for in their leaders.

Score: 10.0, 7.5, 9.5, 27.0 cumulative

***

Meanwhile on planet earth, Obama's horrendous month, in which "the mask slipped" and he was exposed as a racist com-symp who looks down his nose at most Americans, produced a twenty point improvement in his popular standing. This is an unacceptable finding, for which there is only one solution: dissolving the American people and electing a new one.

†Brooks cites a single survey (from Pew, by the description, though he offers no citation) showing Obama currently losing support among Democrats in a hypothetical matchup with John McCain. One free opportunity to anonymously flame the Jewcy editor of your choice to the reader who can identify Brooks' fallacy.

††Why the scare quotes? I'll lay, let's say, 3:2 odds that the author of Kristol's Times columns is a young hack (or a team of them) at the Weekly Standard or some ideologically friendly institute or rag. But even if it's a losing bet for me, it's not a winning bet for Kristol. If I'm wrong, and this is how he actually writes and thinks, that hardly constitutes vindication.

The Good:

In the Baltimore Sun, Brian Katulis and Matthew Duss tear to shreds the argument for prolonging the occupation of Iraq on the grounds that Iranian-backed extremist groups threaten to topple the legitimate government. The simple fact of the matter is that Iran has an obvious strategic interest in controlling as much of Iraq as it can, and to maximize that interest, Iran is hedging its bets and supporting every Shiite faction in Iraq, including both the Sadrists and elements of the Maliki government. If some Shiite faction eventually gains the upper hand, Iran will be able to exert control over Iraq's resources and political structure. If the Shiites continue fighting amongst themselves and no one faction wins out over the others, Iran will be able to exert control over Iraq's resources and political structure. That is what's called, in game theory, a dominant position, and it's what rational actors strive for.

The Bad:

Who cares about the substantial evidence adduced by Katulis and Duss, based onNouri al-Maliki and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Only Shiites who hate each other hold hands what Iran does, that the Islamic Republic acts to maximize its preferences and responds to rational pressures? Charles Krauthammer doesn't care. He is much more concerned with what Iran's leaders say (even those, like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who have no actual power to implement policy), and this concern leads him to urge a bombastic threat of nuclear retaliation in the event that Iran attacks Israel. Never mind that Israel already has a deterrent nuclear arsenal. Or that no country doubts that the US would back Israel in a defensive war. (We might not, of course, support an aggressive Israeli move like the Suez attack of 1956 --- and that's a good thing.) No, according to Krauthammer, the survival of Israel depends on triple-super deterrence. And anyone who denies the necessity of giving Israel a third layer of purely rhetorical defense is guilty of --- wait for it --- failing to honor the lessons of the Holocaust.

Two can play this game. Sure, Krauthammer sounds like he means business with his Holocaust Declaration, but then why does he not join my Holocaust² Declaration, the declaration that one will make the Holocaust Declaration? What about the Holocaust³ Declaration, the declaration that one will make the declaration that one will make the Holocaust Declaration? The Holocaust⁴ Declaration, the declaration that one will make the declaration that one will make the declaration that one will make the Holocaust Declaration? I suspect he won't sign on because, deep down, Krauthammer is really indifferent to the survival of the Jewish state.

The Good:

Resources are scarce. That's why the field of economics exists. In particular, the financial and personnel resources of the US army are limited and near their breaking point. Andrew Bacevich makes what ought to be the uncontroversial point that any future policy in Iraq that doesn't take account of the increasing scarcity of our resources is not a policy, but a pipe dream.

The Bad:

Michael Yon, discontent merely to break the army by sustaining the presently unsustainable level of US troops in Iraq, would like to increase their numbers. Has he been keeping a spare 50,000 soldiers in a box?

The Good:

George Will notes that Mark Penn's lobbying on behalf of the Colombian Free Trade Agreement was only "wrong" because the Democratic candidates are locked in a duplicitous race to the bottom to see who can be the more effective protectionist fearmonger. Barack Obama, in particular, could stand to listen to Austan Goolsbee's admonition that "60 to 70 percent of the economy" --- including the sectors in which organized labor is growing most rapidly --- "faces virtually no international competition." Both Democratic candidates could also stand to read the actual terms of the Colombian FTA. That way, they might learn that the FTA is largely unobjectionable even on protectionist grounds, and actually serves mostly to balance out the currently unequal exposure the American market has to Colombian goods.

The Bad:

Consider this nod something of a lifetime achievement award for Paul Krugman, who apparently believes that his contract with the New York Times is best satisfied by dedicating every other column he writes to boring his readers out of their minds attacking Barack Obama's health care plan on the same grounds, for the same reasons, in the same language. We get it already, Paul. (By the way, to illustrate his point, Krugman might have selected one of the "health care horror stories" that his paper didn't report days earlier was complete bullshit.) As "progressive" health care economists like David Cutler and Ted Marmor would be happy to explain (and Jonah Goldberg is at the very least right that liberals ought to ditch the horrible term "progressive"), mandates just don't matter that much to achieving universality. But Krugman doesn't need that explanation. He already knows mandates don't matter that much. What's the point of his relentless, cynical attack? "He thinks that a black candidate will lose a national election. So it’s bad tactics to support Mr Obama." How progressive.

The Ugly:

Lanny Davis believes Barack Obama "clearly...does not share the extremist views of Rev. Wright. He is a tolerant and honorable person." However, he also has "tried to get over my unease surrounding Barack Obama's response to the sermons and writings of his pastor." Having tried and failed, he thinks the best alternative to successfully getting over that unease --- say, by pointing out that Obama is a tolerant and honorable person and leaving it at that --- is to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal implying that Obama does share the extremist views of Rev. Wright. As Davis might put it, "unanswered questions remain" about Davis's ongoing determination to rescue his candidate's sinking campaign by using every instant of media exposure he can get to stoke racial resentment.

The Good:

Writing for National Journal, Jonathan Rauch plays psychiatrist to himself, trying to analyze what's preventing him from developing this crush on Obama he's heard so much about:

[I]t's these doubts, this hesitation. About Obama. A man I respect. Admire. I want to fall for him, love him as so many others do. But ... I can't. I try, but I can't.

Ah. This is not so uncommon. Obama Resistance Complex. You have Barack blockage. You are afraid to love, to commit.

No, no. Some of my conservative friends think that Obamamania is a messianic cult. I don't. I understand the enthusiasm. I can't remember when I've seen a politician with as much promise. He is eloquent, charismatic, cool under fire. He's the best kind of intellectual: super-smart but not patronizing. He has taken political risks to show moral leadership. Who else would have stood at Martin Luther King's pulpit and condemned homophobia and anti-Semitism in the black community?

And wouldn't it be something to have a black president! Think of the bloody chapters in American history a President Obama could close. I want to believe. I go home, shut my eyes, and say, "Yes I can!"

But I can't.

Take a breath. Here, blow your nose. Now, try to tell me why you think you have these issues. Let it out.

In the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan explains how Hillary Clinton's ridiculous fabrications of a Rambo-run through Bosnia, and even more embarrassing excuse for her prevarications (she blamed an 8-year-old girl for forcing her to keep her head up amid the threat of sniper fire), are fitting synecdoches of her campaign's schizophrenia:

What, really, is Mrs. Clinton doing? She is having the worst case of cognitive dissonance in the history of modern politics. She cannot come up with a credible, realistic path to the nomination. She can't trace the line from "this moment's difficulties" to "my triumphant end." But she cannot admit to herself that she can lose. Because Clintons don't lose. She can't figure out how to win, and she can't accept the idea of not winning. She cannot accept that this nobody from nowhere could have beaten her, quietly and silently, every day. (She cannot accept that she still doesn't know how he did it!)

She is concussed. But she is a scrapper, a fighter, and she's doing what she knows how to do: scrap and fight. Only harder. So that she ups the ante every day. She helped Ireland achieve peace. She tried to stop Nafta. She's been a leader for 35 years. She landed in Bosnia under siege and bravely dodged bullets. It was as if she'd watched the movie "Wag the Dog," with its fake footage of a terrified refugee woman running frantically from mortar fire, and found it not a cautionary tale about manipulation and politics, but an inspiration.

The Bad:

Disgraced ex-Justice Department lawyer and unindicted war criminal John Yoo --- the brains behind the administration's operative constitutional theory according to which the president is an elected dictator above all laws and unaccountable to any branch of government, who engineered the administration's violations of the Geneva conventions and provided the legal framework for a wide ranging policy of torture and secret indefinite interrogation, who defends the proposition that the president has the inalienable right to crush the testicles of an innocent child if he deems it necessary for "national security" --- takes to the Wall Street Journal to hector the Democrats for violating the democratic principles of the Constitution by... involving superdelegates in their presidential nomination.

According to Yoo:

[The framers of the Constitution] believed that letting Congress choose the president was a dreadful idea. Without direct election by the people, the Framers said that the executive would lose its independence and vigor and become a mere servant of the legislature.

How much idiocy is it possible to pack into two sentences? Yoo seems determined to find out. The Framers never provided for direct popular election of the president. At the Constitutional Convention, direct election of the president was proposed twice. It was defeated both times. The Framers were so enthusiastic about direct popular votes that they created an upper congressional chamber, the Senate, whose members were appointed by state legislatures. Senators were not elected until the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913. Today, the president is still not elected directly. State popular votes determine which slate of electors will be sent to the electoral college. Those electors are technically free to vote for whomever they choose. And the national popular vote winner doesn't automatically become president; otherwise the country would have been spared the constitutional wisdom of John Yoo.

On the other hand, the Framers were so worried about depriving the executive branch of its independence and making it subservient to Congress that they gave Congress primacy in the Constitution as well as the power to override presidential vetoes and impeach and remove the president from office.

And there you have it. The Bush administration selects only the best and brightest legal scholars (who believe that Article II of the Constitution grants the president the inherent authority to crush innocent children's testicles).

I can personally vouch for David F. Smydra's insightful post into the reasons mainstream media fails at substantively covering religion. It was the summer of 1999, a year after graduation, and in the pre-millennial madness that enveloped God's city – the sanatorium averaged two messiahs a month the years before, it was getting seven a week at the time – I lost my bearings somewhere around the Damascus Gate. Only in Jerusalem can one feel so lost.

It happens to most at some point, my editor at the Jerusalem Post explained, "The book of psalms calls Jerusalem the City of God and Zechariah calls it the City of Truth – but which God and whose truth?"

The city and the country itself forces one to wrestle with these eternal questions. And without answers, the lines between fact and faith, religion and politics, the sacred and the secular blurred, leaving behind a conflicted and confused young reporter.

My parents are Israeli-born, but raised their children in America. I've been straddling borders religious, national or otherwise all my life. I thought I was as well equipped as anyone to deal with whatever Israel threw at me: a degree in philosophy from Vassar, a thesis on Kierkegaard and Jewish thought, and a six-month research and ethnographic study at Hebrew University.

It wasn't enough to cover religion in Israel. While interviewing a Sufi mystic in Ramallah, the man leaned over and whispered, "Hamas will some day live by the words of Rumi and not the sword of Allah." If I had known then that he was referring to the 13th century poet Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi, who preached tolerance, I would have recognized the importance of his statement. A Palestinian religious leader was, in effect, condemning his own. It didn't make the paper, because I didn't realize what was meant till much later.

Many of my colleagues had similar experiences. The American Press, by and large, lacks a critical perspective informed by knowledge. To a journalist, skepticism is the pillar in which all else is built. But how can one honestly question doctrine or deed without an understanding of either?

In Israel, my experience as a journalist begged the question of how religion is covered. In America, it's why religion isn't covered enough.

After a year, I left the Jerusalem Post to help start a media venture started by CNN executives targeting Baby Boomers, a demographic in hot pursuit of 'what it all means.' I interviewed Deepak Chopra, Rabbi Harold Kushner, leading academics and other figures in the spiritual marketplace, and I came to understand that you cannot grapple with America, its history and contemporary forces, without understanding the nature and history of its religious life.

Spotty religious reporting isn't a new thing. Louis Cassels wrote a much-read syndicated religion column from 1959 to 1973 for United Press International. He admitted that the worst error he remembered making was repeating the historically discredited claim that Islam was spread forcibly by the sword during religion's years of early growth, "My error stemmed from plain ignorance rather than malice."

Faith matters, and not only within the walls of a church, synagogue or mosque. There is Bible study at a Houston oil and gas company. Weekly yoga at dot-coms. Torah class at Microsoft and Islamic study at Whirlpool. In this year's presidential elections, there are relentless invocations of the Almighty. So why isn't coverage better? Why do editors show such a disregard when pitched with a religion story?

A media and religion survey by the First Amendment Center found that 76% of religion writers felt that formal training in religious studies is either helpful or essential. Sadly, 6 out of 10 writers said they had no such training.

Much of the media views religion suspiciously, or worse, as irrelevant. Journalists deal in matters of fact, religion in matters of faith, and rarely the twain shall meet. When they do, it's usually because religion intersects with politics or scandal. The latter usually determines the treatment of the former and as a result neither is dealt with wisely. So it's not just a question of giving religion more prominence, but encountering it with more understanding.

More important than the sort of knowledge one gains in the academy is what you might call religious street smarts or pew-level understanding. Contending with the powerful convictions and lofty ideas inherent to the beat require an intellectual grounding supported by a naive narrator's immersion into the experience of faith -- what journalists covering a war call "embedded." The "small" stories, the quiet, daily influence of religion on people's lives are as important as the larger issues that arise from covering belief systems or religious philosophy.

Is anyone doing a good job? There are a handful. Jeff Sharlet, editorial adviser to Jewcy, may be among the finest. His investigative reports from the evangelical front lines appearing in publications like Rolling Stone and Harpers are the very embodiment of pew-level reportage that are also intellectually grounded. His daily review of religion and the press, called The Revealer, is one of the better religion sites on the Web.

Here's a snapshot of what Sharlet, and his colleagues at The Revealer, find worthwhile elsewhere on the Web:

Bartholomew's Notes on Religion looks at "religion in the news" from a perspective that's not so much liberal as relentlessly skeptical of absurdity, and intrigued by belief.

Casing the Promised Land offers an intelligent roundup of religion news from a center-left perspective.

Christianity Today's blog is a superb resource regardless of your faith or lack thereof. Regular blogger Ted Olson roams far and wide and has the wisdom to bring back more than just the controversy of the day.

DeepBlog: Not a God beat blog itself, but a good directory to the blogosphere with a growing list of "Spiritual Blogs."

Direland, a sharply written politcs and media blog by journalist Doug Ireland, occasionally runs a "theocracy watch" colum

On Religion is an excellent newsclipping service -- terrific links to the hot topic of the moment and good finds from the lesser-known press.

OpEdNews's Religion and Politics page publishes a fine collection of original, politically progressive religion essays as well as links to other noteworthy religion articles.

The Raving Atheist, "An Atheistic Examination of the Culture of Belief [on] How Religious Devotion Trivializes American Law and Politics," is an intensely intelligent, often funny, and all around well-made blog that's good enough for true believers as well as godless folk.

Relapsed Catholic is a fierce godblog without mercy for liberals or unbelievers, by Kathy Shaidle, a Canadian journalist and poet with a sharp eye for the absurd and compelling.

Brian Flemming is the man behind Bat Boy: The Musical, and his blog is everything you'd expect from a man with such interests. Which, naturally, include religion, commented on from a smart, liberal perspective. Mostly limited to the news of the day, you'll find original ideas here, and, if you care to do some free associating with Brian's other interests, genuine inspiration.

Makeout City's Jay McCarthy understands the art of linking and the collage possibilities of threading together fragments from around the web -- whether they're his own thoughts or collected ideas from others, his posts are always essays. Jay is a man who gets the Montaignesque potential of blog. He often comments on religion, a subject in which Jay has read widely and eclecticly.

The Claremont Review of Books, put out by the conservative Claremont Institute ("a new, reinvigorated conservatism, one that draws upon the timeless principles of the American founding, and applies them to the moral and political problems that we face today") is an interesting, intellectual read, whether or not you agree with their purpose, to help conservatism "understand its own majestic purposes, and become a more effective political force."

Nth Position is a webzine that advertises "high weirdness" in all areas of inquiry; investigate their "strangeness" category for manifestations of the divine. Excellent writing and surprisingly good reporting (given that there's limited cash behind this fine endeavor).

Oliver Willis bills himself as "kryptonite to stupid," and we can testify to that slogan's truth. Hey, wait -- does that make us dumb? Nah. It just means Oliver is really smart. His popular blog is mostly political talk from a "center-left" perspective, but we think it's relevant to Revealer readers because Oliver gets the role of religion in American politics. That is, he gets that it has one, whether we like it or not, and that Dems and liberals in the U.S. are blind to its full influence and importance beyond the borders of New York and L.A.

One Inch Ahead features an interesting confluence of spirit and flesh--in the occasionally religious musings of a long distance runner.

As campaign season heats up, the candidates'
"religious beliefs" will increasingly become part of the American conversation. The media isn't likely to be of much help. If Iraq is your issue, you can count on an endless parade of articles describing just about every aspect of the war; the same won't be true of the candidates religious beliefs and practices.

I understand why religion reporters so frequently give up the beat, and why their story ideas meet with skepticism from editors. Because while reporters are forced to think about the outside world, religion forces us to consider the interior world.

Consider how a reporter goes about his beat. If it's education, then he visits the school district and reports on what teachers and staff and students tell him. But if it's religion, going to a church, mosque or temple doesn't work quite as well. Private conversations with God aren't all that accessible to reporters. The First Amendment gives reporters the freedom to ask questions of whomever they please; it doesn't bestow magical mind-reading powers.

Take abortion, for example. How often does a reporter really attempt to get inside the head of a Christian evangelist pro-life advocate? Or Palestinian-Israeli relations. How often does a reporter ask a person in that dispute, "What do your prayers with God tell you about this situation?"

Very rarely. And that's because editors are bred to treat with skepticism any reporter's attempt to get inside a source's head. This works in 90 percent of journalism because reporters and editors have to guard against the possibility that the source is bullshitting them. And more often than not, that type of maneuver can be checked against empirical, verifiable, external facts and evidence. Not so with religion. If a source tells a reporter that she's voting for Huckabee or Edwards because her prayers guided her in that direction, how could a reporter possibly call bullshit?

As this process unfolds, I'd love to see reporters really dig into religious issues. Not so much what the candidates believe, but what Americans believe -- remembering, also, that no belief at all is still a belief in something. Because the campaign offers a high-profile opportunity for journalists to get it right, to set the agenda, to bridge the interior to the external. People vote not always for what they suspect will affect their surroundings, but also for what they hold closest to their souls. I've seen countless stories so far on how Iraq, the economy, and health care are helping voters sort out their presidential preferences. But I haven't seen a single story where reporters really interrogate a number of Americans about their religious beliefs.

Good reporting, no matter the subject, challenges our assumptions and adds nuance to our understanding of the world we live in. Informed, accessible coverage of "religious beliefs" must be part of of this process.

This week it came to light that the International and Serious Crimes Unit (ISCU) of the Israeli police have been interrogating three Israeli journalists for travelling to enemy states.

The journalists, whose names are Ron Ben-Yishai, Tsur Shezaf, and Lisa Goldman, had travelled to either Lebanon or Syria to report on stories in the region. They did so using foreign passports (Israel allows dual citizenship), and without the permission of the Ministry of the Interior.

The police unit investigating the journalists issued a statement in which they announced that the journalists violated Israel's Infiltration Prevention Law (IPL), which prohibits Israeli citizens from travelling into enemy territory without permission of the Ministry of the Interior.

The police further stated that,

"The police take a grave view of Israeli citizens travelling to enemy countries, even if this is done on foreign passports they hold. Besides endangering their own lives, travelling to enemy countries also poses a danger to national security."

If charged and convicted, the journalists could spend up to four years in jail.

While there is not much doubt that the three journalist violated the law, there is a great deal of concern about the selective application and overall wisdom of the IPL.

For starters, it needs to be stated that these journalists were not the first Israelis to violate this law. For years, Israelis with dual citizenship have been travelling to enemy states in their thousands, often with the full knowledge of the authorities. Within the past six months alone, over a dozen Israeli journalist have travelled to enemy states.

Of course saying that other people break the law is not an argument for anyone's innocence. But why is it that the authorities feel it necessary to prosecute these three journalists and not the rest? Some have suggested that the move to prosecute is an effort by the state toward even-handedness with regards to Arab-Israeli citizens charged with the same crime (including MK's). Others are not convinced that the motives are so noble. To them this whole episode reeks of government efforts to control the press by intimidation.

The motivation behind the prosecution aside, the real issue here is the wisdom, utility, and justness of this law. The IPL was passed by the Knesset in 1954 in order to prohibit Palestinians refugees from returning to their homes. Some years later, an amendment was added to the law which forbids Israelis from travelling to enemy states without permission of the government (permission that is rarely given).

Most people believe the law serves the public good by protecting both the individual and national security. The fear is that by entering enemy territory Israelis run the risk of being abducted and used as bargaining tools for political prisoners.

While it is granted that living democracies must find a balance between the need for security and the need for freedom, the existence and implementation of this law goes beyond the pale. It is simply not the place of the Israeli government to say where on earth (literally!) its citizen can and cannot travel. Warning, yes. Restrictions, no.

The truth of the matter is that Israelis abroad run a risk of being kidnapped no matter where they go—from Dubai and India to London and Argentina. Indeed, the most famous case of an Israeli civilian being abducted, the kidnapping of Elhanan Tennenbaum by Hezbollah in 2000, took place in Dubai—a country not considered enemy territory by Israel. Should Israelis therefore be barred from travelling anywhere on the globe they could potentially be harmed? Bottom line: the government, as an editorial in Haaretz put it, "is not the nanny of its citizens."

Israelis, especially professional journalists, must be free to put themselves in harm's way with the full knowledge that their country may not rescue them. It needs to be remembered that when Gaza was opened to Israeli journalists, this was indeed the policy of the Israeli government. Every Israeli journalist was required to sign a waiver which stated that the government was not responsible for his or her safety. This, of course, is significantly different from a solider (e.g. Gilad Shalit) who is put in harms way by the government he is serving. In that case, it is the responsibility of the government to do what is necessary to bring him/her to safety.

Curtailing the freedoms of the press, speech, and movement is a price that is too high to justify the existence of the amendment to the Infiltration Prevention Law. A democracy should not cage its citizens for the sake of potential threats. One may expect such laws in countries like Iran, Egypt, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia, but not from a country that proudly proclaims it is the only democracy in the Middle East.

Moreover, it is not clear to me that much public good is served by this law. In a healthy and vital democracy the role of the press is to keep the government accountable by giving the people reliable and independent information about their world. When the government bars its journalist from investigating for themselves the reality of their neighbours, it weakens its democratic character.

Almost all the news that Israelis get about the Arab world comes from second-hand sources (Arab and international media). These reports are not always reliable and do not account for Israeli needs and sensitivities. When an Israeli journalist goes into the field, he/she has the "nose" for what Israeli audiences find important. The value of this difference cannot overstated.

Finally, there is something to be said for talking to one's enemy face to face. The Internet has already created a space where, at the click of a button, an Israeli Jew and an Arab can engage each other in dialogue. It is high time for the Israeli judiciary to follow suit. Whether to know one's enemy, or recognize that one's enemy is really a deformed friend, it is essential and vital that Israel grants its press absolute freedom of movement and expression.

The journalists in question, these border-crossers, are doing Israel a great service for which they deserve to be celebrated—not interrogated. They are courageously speaking truth to power, and for that their place in society ought to be the public square and not the jail cell.

* Lisa Goldman responds, below.
* Ha'aretz knows that Israel "is not the nanny of its citizens."

A couple of weeks ago, Joe Klein wrote a column for Time excoriating the Democrats for pushing an amendment to FISA that, according to Klein's understanding, "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court." Klein's conclusion: "In the lethal shorthand of political advertising," the bill "would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans."

So, politically unsavvy Democrats hand Republicans another propaganda victory on national security issues, and are unserious about protecting the country to boot. This is a story that mainstream pundits are willing and able to write, by rote, in their sleep, on any occasion in which the parties debate national security. But never mind, it's a great scoop. The only problem with it is that it's unequivocally false. The RESTORE act (as it's being called) simply does not require FISA approval of all targeted calls, as Klein alleges, but only in cases in which Americans are spied upon --- a position Klein ostensibly agrees with. In other words, in order to churn out a lazy, uninformed, prefabricated narrative about Democratic insouciance on national security issues, Klein resorted to using a limpid bit of RNC spin as his central exhibit, without bothering to do an even rudimentary investigation of his own.

Staking out a --- count them --- fifth position on his column's accuracy, Klein finally throws up the white flag, admitting "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right." Which is, naturally, a dilemma that suggests its own solution. If you can't comprehend legislative language, draw valid inferences from it, etc., just don't write about it. It really isn't that difficult.

Meanwhile, nearly two full weeks too late, Time got around to posting a correction to the original article. Here it is:

In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don't.

No muss, no fuss. Democrats say one thing, Republicans say another, about an actually fairly straightforward empirical proposition that either is, or is not, true. Mind you, Time feels no obligation to tell its readers whether it's true --- how could one even begin to decide such a thing anyway --- as long as it lets them know two contradictory claims about a matter of fact exist. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what responsible journalism is all about.

Ron Rosenbaum wants magazine journalists to stop fawning and start reporting again:

Powerful figures who now think they can avoid thoroughgoing scrutiny by journalists just by withholding their participation might become a little concerned that magazines might then decide to hire more energetic and investigative-minded reporters (the sociopaths of doom) to look more deeply into their record than those who lazily settle for unexamined explanations and equivocations in person. And a write-around would of course inform the reader that the subject is afraid of facing a nonsycophantic reporter, may indeed have something to hide, questions he or she doesn't want raised.

[...]

And you editors out there. Don't be so attached to having a big shiny famous head on your cover. Don't be afraid to use stock photos: A well-chosen black-and-white stock photo can give a cover subject a something-to-hide, caught-in-the-act look that can be far more dramatic and revealing (and often truthful) than the big shiny exclusive photo head.

Let's put it this way: The best intellectual journalism ever conducted on leftist politics in the 1930's was Murray Kempton's Part of Our Time, in which he relied -- so far as I know -- on no first-hand sources or personal interviews to profile figures as surreptitious as Whittaker Chambers, Alger Hiss, Lee Pressman, Paul Robeson and Elizabeth Bentley. (Writing about Communists in real time, without the benefit of declassified archives, was like translating the Dead Sea Scrolls into Esperanto.)

In fact, I'd underwrite Ron's good sense about the write-around with following thought experiment: Compare any work of investigative journalism about the Soviet Union that used one-on-one interviews with Joseph Stalin with those that did not. Which gave the more accurate assessments of life in the world's first workers' state?

I had meant to post this last week. A grim reminder that freedom of the press is under assault not just at home:

BBC correspondent Alan Johnston disappeared on his way home from his Gaza City office on 12 March. He is feared kidnapped in the lawless territory, where he is thought to have been the only international correspondent still working. Intensive efforts have been made to secure his release.

Sign the petition calling for Johnston's release here.

From the Department of Sad Things: David Halberstam has been killed in a car crash just north of where I'm writing these words. He was apparently in a car driven by a journalism student from Berkeley's J-School, where he had just spoken on Saturday. My thoughts and prayers go out to the Halberstam family, the student who was driving, and everyone who was involved in the accident.