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Democracy in Action: Generous Political Donors Rewarded on Super Bowl Weekend (NYTimes)
“A group of Democratic senators gathered in Puerto Rico with Washington lobbyists and other donors of at least $15,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Their festivities, at the Ritz-Carlton resort in San Juan, include a Super Bowl party, at which they will be watching the game on television.
“Republicans will have a presence at the game at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla. For the 10th year in a row, the National Republican Congressional Committee offered deep-pocket donors tickets to the game and a chance to rub elbows with Congressional leaders, including J. Dennis Hastert, the House speaker, and Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia, the committee chairman, plus golf, tennis and a tour of the Kennedy Space Center.
“The price of the Republican weekend is $10,000 a head, which includes a dinner and the bus ride to the stadium, but not airfare or four nights of hotel accommodations at a Disney hotel in Orlando. The minimum required donation is up, from $6,000 in 1997. Carl M. Forti, a spokesman for the committee, said 150 donors were expected.
“Both gatherings were full of lobbyists from the telecommunications, health care and financial industries, all of which have matters before Congress. SBC Communications Inc., based in Houston, sent representatives to the Democratic and the Republican events. Democrats also drew representatives of several big Washington law firms, including Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson & Hand, which lobbies for scores of companies, and Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, which also has a big lobbying practice. The companies represented in Florida with the Republicans included Bristol- Myers Squibb.”
From Thailand to Zion: Home and Away (Micha Odenheimer in Ha'aretz)
“Israel, the beginning of the new millennium. Drive past its farms, walk through its orchards, peek into its greenhouses. Chances are good that the faces you see will be foreign faces, Oriental faces. Silent faces - faces that speak neither Hebrew nor English. More likely than not, the people you find picking Israeli vegetables are Thai laborers.
“For Israeli farmers, especially those on privately owned farms, the Thai workers are a blessing. It has been at least two decades since significant numbers of Israelis (outside of kibbutzim) could be found doing the physically exhausting, minimum-wage labor involved in agriculture. Palestinian workers, as events have again shown, are an unreliable work force, subject to closures and uprisings. The Thais, according to their bosses, are quiet, clean, reliable, good natured and undemanding.”
. . .
“Ra'anan Cohen, the minister of agriculture, is a special target of ire [for the man who began importing these workers:
“'He wants to reinvent Zionism, the fool. He says that high school kids should come pick oranges. Let him send his son!'
“But didn't you used to pick oranges when you were that age?
“"Of course I did!" he snaps. "But that was before they had the Internet."
. . .
“The exodus of young people to Bangkok or abroad, which gives them an opportunity to send money back to their parents, has a paradoxical relationship to traditional Thai (and Lao) Buddhist culture. Buddhism in Thailand, in short, provides the inner justification for its own demise.
Ashcroft and Antisemitism (consortiumnews.com)
“When John Ashcroft addressed an audience at Bob Jones University on May 8, 1999, the man who is now George W. Bush’s nominee to be attorney general cited – and exaggerated – a passage from the Book of John that has contributed to the persecution of Jews for the past two millennia.
“Ashcroft, then a Republican senator from Missouri, ventured into this controversial doctrinal terrain with an argument that "a slogan of the American Revolution" was a declaration that the colonists recognized only Jesus as their king.”
Their MoJo's Working: The Bush Files (Mother Jones)
“We did a quick Web search on Jenna Bush's name, and came up with a dead link to a paper the Co-First Daughter wrote in her "Rhetoric of Fairy Tales" course at UT. Using Google's handy cache utility, we recovered the text. It seems students were charged with revising an old fairy tale, and Jenna decided to rewrite Cinderella as "Chanderalla of Harlem," making the protagonist black and a slave to her evil stepmother (who Chanderalla's father met at a VFW dance). Chanderalla meets the mayor's son at the ball, and ends up marrying into power and going to college.”
Eben Moglen: The Encryption Wars (immaterial.net)
“Now, after I finished making that pitch, I was leaving the room, and the chief of one of the computing centers in one of the big universities turned to one of his opposite numbers and said to him in Hebrew, 'Oh, these Americans, they're so idealistic. It's impossible.' And I said, you see, the Zionists are no longer the idealists. It's the Americans. Now, they'll get there eventually, but as of now, they're not ready yet....“...But the whole political structure that we have at the moment, the ease of getting patents, the giving away of spectrum in the '96 Act to people who already had spectrum to build an HDTV system that we notice they're not building, the Federal Communications Commissions fundamental strategy of permitting duopolies in whole areas of their traditional regulated fields, so long as those duopolies then go out and compete in other fields against other duopolies - all these structures bear a similar sign, which is that everything is for sale because our politics is for sale, and that the law's power to create property is now in use in a very heavy way.
“Allan Greenspan gives a speech and he says, 'We should beware of economic regulation and government interference in the market. Government should limit itself to creating and protecting intellectual property.' As though that weren't regulation and intervention in the market. What we have is massive market intervention by legislators who have the power to create property rights through law and who are selling it. We can't create a free anything, because it is ideologically deprecated for things to be free, and most importantly, because it is politically ineffective for things to be free, because making things free doesn't bring in campaign contributions.”
News of the Old: The European Geniza (Eliezer Segal)
"The world of academic Judaic scholarship is currently in the midst of a most exciting new discovery, which has been designated the "European Geniza," and whose breathtaking dimensions are only beginning to be appreciated."Thousands of pages have been discovered so far in archives throughout Italy. Unlike the better-known finds like the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Cairo Geniza, which consist largely of minute fragments that have to be reassembled like puzzles, most of the Italian documents are complete pages that have been extracted from their original bound volumes. They cover a representative sampling of Jewish literary genres, including the Bible and its commentaries, Talmudic and halakhic works, liturgy, science, philosophy and other subjects.
"Among the more interesting finds is a tenth-century page of the Tosefta, which is the oldest known text of this third-century rabbinic work. There are also pages from the complete Torah commentary of Rabbi Joseph Kara, a student and colleague of Rashi who espoused the literal interpretation of the Bible. Prior to its discovery, the scholarly consensus was that Kara had not composed a complete, sequential commentary to the Torah."
"What most liberals and most Jews don't understand about people like Ashcroft is that their deep respect for religious faith genuinely transcends sectarian divides. And that often makes it easier for me, as a religious Jew, to work for them than for Jews or Christians who don't take any religion seriously as a force in people's lives."In my experience, when you tell a nonobservant Jewish boss you need time off for Shavuot, there is often a moment of discomfort, as if he thinks you are acting superior for taking off what many Jews see as a minor holiday. When you tell an observant gentile, he may ask you what the holiday is and then say he is happy that you are observing Pentecost."
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