Upper East Side Handjobs

From Nerve.com, BODY WORK:

A month later, after I spent a day in Queens filing in the nude, my sister requested that if I was going to sell myself, I do it someplace where she wouldn’t worry I’d be raped or killed. So I answered a Craigslist ad for “artists” — full-time pay, part-time hours, no sex — and there I was, sitting with Robin in an Upper East Side diner at three in the afternoon, picking at my pancakes and talking about handjobs.

Yes, this is serious.

Via the good people at Gawker, an article by Rabbi Gellman at Newsweek:

And for this we dumped Joe? It just makes no sense to me and it ought to be a huge embarrassment to all card-carrying Jews whether they agreed with Joe or not…

I learned this distinction from the men of the Western Shvitz. One day a tribal Jewish friend took me to a shvitz on Western Avenue in Chicago. A shvitz (there are hardly any of them left) is a place where heterosexual Jewish men used to go to sit in a searingly hot steam room, get hit with soapy oak-leaf clusters called pleitzas, eat herring and black bread with red pop, play cards and tell jokes. I was really beaten down that day. I had been unsuccessfully trying to raise money for Israel from an assortment of cosmopolitan university Jews, each of whom had some phony but articulate reason why they would be intellectually compromised if they gave me a dollar for Israel.

True fact: if you stab a Jewish person in the heart, I hear spiders come out (or at least from Rabbi Gellman’s mouth).

Lamont, Bad For Vested Foreign Interests?

And from Hotline on Call:

LIEBERMAN LOOKING FOR NEW CAMPAIGN TEAM…
DODD TASKED WITH TALKING LEIBERMAN OUT OF INDY RUN…
NO STATEWIDE DEMS (NOT EVEN LARSON AND DODD) AT LIEBERMAN’S CONCESSION SPEECH…
LIEBERMAN EXPECTED TO ANNOUNCE INDEPENDENT BID TOMORROW; HIS TEAM TAKES COMFORT IN THE CLOSER MARGINS……

Also, this is Joe Lieberman:

Just One More Day For Joe

For the pragmatism-over-positions ‘Democrats’ that have been eager to ruin their party:

It cannot be argued in good faith that Democrats are intolerant of any elected official who supported the war in Iraq or that such support is some sort of “litmus test.” There are scores of pro-war Democrats who are not being ejected from the party or even being challenged electorally. Lieberman went far beyond mere support for the war, and repeatedly adopted the most demonizing and extremist rhetoric used by Bush’s supporters to equate opposition to the Bush administration’s foreign policies with anti-Americanism and support for America’s enemies. It should surprise nobody if the people whom Lieberman has been attacking and demonizing in this manner decide that they would like to have a different senator.

To Israel with Love (and gobs of money and military support)

Good for the Economist:

The political establishment is even more firmly behind Israel than the public is. Support for Israel stretches from San Francisco liberals like Nancy Pelosi to southern-fried conservatives like Bill Frist. The House and Senate have both passed bipartisan resolutions condemning Hizbullah and affirming Congress’s support for Israel. The House version passed by 410 to 8 (of which three were from districts in Michigan with concentrations of Arab-Americans). The Senate resolution, sponsored by 62 senators—including the leaders of both parties—passed unopposed.

Indeed, the parties are engaged in a competition to see who can be the most pro-Israeli. Twenty or so Democrats, including Ms Pelosi, the House leader, and Harry Reid, the Senate leader, demanded that Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, retract his criticisms of Israel or have his invitation to address Congress cancelled. (Mr Maliki, strongly backed by the administration, was eventually allowed to go ahead.) Several leading Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, have addressed pro-Israeli rallies. The contrast with the simmering rage within the Labour Party over Tony Blair’s support for George Bush could hardly be more marked.

Pro-Israeli forces command the intellectual high ground as well as the corridors of power. Commentators such as Charles Krauthammer issue column after column ridiculing the notion of proportionality and stressing Hizbullah’s responsibility for civilian casualties. Most middle-of-the-road commentators question the effectiveness, rather than the morality, of Israel’s actions. Out-and-out critics of Israel are relegated to the sidelines.

Why is America so much more pro-Israeli than Europe? The most obvious answer lies in the power of two very visible political forces: the Israeli lobby (AIPAC) and the religious right. AIPAC, which has an annual budget of almost $50m, a staff of 200, 100,000 grassroots members and a decades-long history of wielding influence, is arguably the most powerful lobby in Washington, mightier even than the National Rifle Association.

“Thank God we have AIPAC, the greatest supporter and friend we have in the whole world,” says Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister. The lobby, which is the centrepiece of a co-ordinated body that includes pressure groups, think-tanks and fund-raising operations, produces voting statistics on congressmen that are carefully scrutinised by political donors. It also organises regular trips to Israel for congressmen and their staffs. (The Washington Post reports that Roy Blunt, the House majority whip, has been on four.)

The Christian right is also solidly behind Israel. White evangelicals are significantly more pro-Israeli than Americans in general; more than half of them say they strongly sympathise with Israel. (A third of the Americans who claim sympathy with Israel say that this stems from their religious beliefs.) Two in five Americans believe that Israel was given to the Jewish people by God, and one in three say that the creation of the state of Israel was a step towards the Second Coming.