Yesterday I wrote the following about Hillary Rodham Clinton :

Shameless.

Despicable.

Unfit to be President of the United States.

My words hit the front pages of both Daily Kos and The Moderate Voice. By evening Keith Olbermann had the following to say about Hillary Clinton's latest "gaffe" :

The most important part of the transcript is after the jump :

Here are more of Elizabeth Upton's student submissions to 10Questions.com. They are in the CUNY Language Immersion Program at LaGuardia Community College.

The previous videos are here.

Maria has a simple question about Iraq:

Magdalena is worried about the internet :

Elizabeth wants to know about how they will handle violence in schools:

A travesty of justice has taken place in Brooklyn. Debbie Almontaser, the woman who created the vision of a dual-language Arabic-English school in Brooklyn has been forced to resign from her position as the principal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA) as a result of a smear campaign carried out by an organization known as “Stop the Madrassa Coalition” (SMC) with a great deal of support by the New York Post and a surprising dearth of support by the Department of Education.

Debbie is a woman who personifies peace and interfaith connections, yet articles in the Post and statements by the Stop the Madrassa group have portrayed her as supporting violence and wanting to create an Islamic school. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

I swear. John McCain once seemed reasonable to me. But he has become the worst, most glibly foolish war monger in the running, it seems. From MoveOn.org (the group that has recently teamed up with VoteVets.org to give our veterans more of a voice):

At a campaign stop on Wednesday, Sen. John McCain was asked what to do about Iran. His response? He sang "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann."

Seriously.

He says it was a joke, but the bottom line is that it is reckless saber-rattling against Iran at a time when tensions are high. Will you help us counter his message on TV?

McCain is laughing at the idea of unilaterally attacking Iran.

McCain is, in effect, laughing at this:

and this: (from the New England Journal of Medicine via The Memory Hole)

Because THAT is what his Iraq Escalation/Iran attack would produce more of. Dead and wounded American soldiers. And for what? NEITHER Iraq under Hussein nor Iraq have had any dealings with al-Qaeda. Why aren't we fighting al-Qaeda. While McCain wants to expand the Iraq quagmire into Iran, al-Qaeda is also expanding, entering Iraq thanks to us, expanding in Somalia, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Algeria, Morocco...and extremists are taking power in Bahrain. And McCain wants to make it all worse.

April 20th is Hitler’s Birthday. In 1943, Heinrich Himmler wanted to give Hitler a particularly nice birthday present. He decided that in honor of Hitler’s birthday he would eliminate the entire Jewish Ghetto of Warsaw, which had been causing trouble in the early months of 1943.

Instead, the Jews of Warsaw gave Hitler a present that he certainly didn’t want: months of armed rebellion that DEFEATED the German army repeatedly and wasn’t completely crushed until October 1943, though major combat operations, to borrow a phrase, were completed around May. Including the periods of more sporadic fighting, this resistance lasted far longer than the German take over of Poland as a whole, which took scarcely one month. It is pointed out in Melvin Konner’s book Unsettled that the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, largely fought by Jews but with some Polish uprisings occurring at the same time and inspired by the Jewish uprising, also lasted longer than the time it took Germany to defeat France, though again you have to include the period of more sporadic fighting as well as the main combat.

The uprising was partly inspired by the Socialist Zionist organization Hashomer Hatzair (coincidentally, my mother briefly belonged to this organization in her youth). Insurgency started in January, 1943. By the end of January the Ghetto was actually controlled by two armed Jewish organizations, one led by Mordechai Anielewicz, of Hashomer Hatzair, and Zivia Lubetkin (who survived the uprising) and the other led by Dawid Mordechaj Apfelbaum, a former officer in the Polish army. As Passover began on April 19th, Himmler’s birthday present to Hitler also began, with thousands of German, Polish and Ukrainian forces attacking the Ghetto. They moved in at 4 a.m. They moved throughout the Ghetto and believed they had occupied it within 4 hours. Then, at the intersection of Mila and Zamenhofa Streets, the insurgents struck with a single captured machine gun, ample small arms fire, and many Molotov cocktails. The Germans were completely routed by the Jewish insurgents by 2 P.M., providing Hitler with a major embarrassment for his birthday.

As you might expect, the conservative noise machine barely paused to catch its breath before beginning its effort to spin the horrible events at Virginia Tech into political gold. Instapundit was among the first out of the gate, as this DKos diary noted. The New York Sun, to nobody's surprise, takes up the same talking points, couching them on a fluffy layer of righteous talk about how America caught "a glimpse of evil" yesterday. There's a certain kind of conservative who loves nothing more than an opportunity to crow about Evil.* It allows him to trumpet his own Moral Clarity, the primary purpose of which is to aid in the process of simplifying and personalizing some difficult issue, and demonizing all those who point out that, by simplifying and personalizing it, the conservative has guaranteed that he will never do anything effectively to resolve it. Talking about "Evil," for this kind of conservative, is a ticket to a cartoon universe whose bright colors and vivid characters might just be enough to distract folks from noticing that such conservatives tend to be disastrously incompetent at dealing with problems in the real world. As for that Moral Clarity, count on it to be discarded the first time it becomes the least bit inconvenient.

But I digress. The Sun shines its dim light on the shootings in hopes of illuminating its argument about the actions of New York's own Mayor Bloomberg, who has continued Rudy Giuliani's strategy of cracking down on illegal guns. It's a strategy that has helped make New York the safest big city in America, but the balls-to-the-wall gun crowd, of course, don't care about that. The NRA has been demonizing Bloomberg for a while now, and the Sun's editors eagerly use the Va. Tech shootings as an opportunity to pile on:

The shooting erupted as a little noticed legal war was gathering between Virginia and New York over our city's legal maneuvering to stem the sale of what Mayor Bloomberg calls illegal guns. The smell of cordite hadn't cleared from the Virginia Tech campus when the declared candidates for president began addressing the shooting, ending, as Mr. Hope put it, "what had been seen as an unwillingness to fully address gun issues so far in the campaign."

More after the break.

I have recently been covering the horrible comment by Japanese Prime Minsiter Abe denying that there is any proof that the sex slaves called "comfort women" used by Japanese soldiers in WW II had been coerced. You can see my coverage here, here and here. From this last one, let me point out that international legal findings disagree with Abe's statement:

"It is indisputable that these women were forced, deceived, coerced and abducted to provide sexual services to the Japanese military ... [Japan] violated customary norms of international law concerning war crimes, crimes against humanity, slavery and the trafficking in women and children ... Japan should take full responsibility now, and make suitable restitution to the victims and their families."

International Commission of Jurists, November 1994

The only response I ever got from my inquiries to the Japanese embassy was that Japan had apologized, set up funds for the comfort women (neglecting to say that these funds were not paid for by the government but mostly from private donors) and that Abe's comments changed nothing.

There has really been a recent dovetailing of Israel related issues. From a Bulgarian friend quizing me on Israel to a discussion among NYC bloggers (offline and private, so none of your business) about Israel/Palestine, to some rather disturbingly anti-Israel diaries on Daily Kos with some outright anti-Semitic overtones. (Note: This statement in NO WAY implies an anti-Semitic bias of dKos in general. The opinions were those of particular individuals, not the community as a whole). And, of course, my recent writing about Jewish issues, including what seemed to be a not so well received piece on the depth and persistence of anti-Semitism historically.

In the context of all of this, I find an editorial that gets to the crux of one key issue in Israeli politics: the balancing of equality for Israeli Arabs with security of Israel as a whole. In an ideal world these two things would not need balancing. But the Middle East is not and never has been an ideal world even if you look back thousands of years.

This is from Abraham Foxman and Ken Jacobson, both of the Anti-Defamation League, and originally appeared in The Jerusalem Post on March 5, 2007:

This also comes from Daily Kos. We are in the middle of what seems to be a successful campaign to convince advertisers that they should not be advertising with Ann Coulter because of her advocacy of terrorism, incitement to violence, and her use of hate speech. Already more than 11 advertisers, including Verizon, AT&T/Cingular and Netbank, are removing their ads from Ann Coulter's website and this has gotten the attention of CNN which reported on the Daily Kos effort.

Remember, Ann Coulter has publicly advocated bombing the NY Times building, poisoning a Supreme Court justice, beating up American citizens she disagrees with (something that may have inspired an actual attack), and has expressed hatred of 9/11 widows. Some advertisers, once made aware of the kind of things she says, quickly pull their ads.

So we are keeping up the pressure and need your help. The Daily Kos Story has an extensive list of advertisers and I strongly urge you to take a look and contact a few. I will highlight a handful here, but this is only a fraction of the targeted advertisers. Go to the Daily Kos Story for a full list.