Brad Sherman: It was on purpose
Via BuzzFeed, Brad Sherman says the distribution of two sets of family photos to constituents -- one with his Mom, one without -- was all part of the plan.
"If people see my family they're going to vote for me," explains the congressman running against fellow Jewish Dem Howard Berman in the LA burbs.
Sherman suggests his campaign didn't have the funds to pay to publish the photo as an ad. "We scraped around to buy an ad in the Jewish Journal."
And now, thanks to the Journal, this humble website, BuzzFeed, and others:
By God, we now have, without us paying for it, copies of pictures of myself and my family in the Jewish Journal and we hope in other publications as well.
There's a sitcom logic in all of this, a kind of Danny Partridge-Reuben Kincaid plot gone awry...
Sherman reminds me a little of Dave Madden, the actor who played Kincaid.
Never mind. I'll take him at his word and say I guess we were suckered.
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Don’t mention the bird!
The Morning Star still shines!
When I lived in Britain in the 1990s, the Communist Party-affiliated newspaper was already an anomaly, barely visible on London's crowded newsstands.
It was good to discover then, via Eli Lake's Twitter feed, that it soldiers on, and is still seized by the vital issues of the day.
Like Israel's national bird.
No, I didn't know that Israel had a national bird, or maybe I did and forgot, and I'm not going to look it up.
But two readers of the paper are furious that the Morning Star included the bird in its daily quiz. Here's one:
The Morning Star has always been the newspaper you could rely on to support the cause of the Palestinians, so why of all the birds in the world did you choose the Israeli national bird to include in your quiz?
Maybe you don't support the methods chosen by the International Solidarity Movement of BDS to assist the Palestinians in their struggle for freedom and justice - a demand that came from them originally.
This includes any reference to their wildlife.
A principled refusal to mention wildlife brings back sweet 1970s era memories of John Cleese, dead parrots and not mentioning the war.
The Morning Star is a repository of such nostalgia; it may be the only daily to have featured Maggie Thatcher on its front page in years, if not decades. (A sure sign they miss her. David Cameron, man up!)
It also has perhaps the most succinct About page I've ever seen.
"For Peace and Socialism." Go argue!
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Brad Sherman’s mom, Photoshop and a camel
Brad Sherman and Howard Berman, both Jewish Democrats, are facing off in a redrawn suburban L.A. district that has a large Jewish population.
LA Observed catches Sherman engaged in some Photoshopping. In a flyer apparently designated for Jewish voters, there's a photo of his family including his mother. But in another mailing using the same photo, his mom is missing.
So who's more insulted here? Jewish voters for being presumed to be swayed by a photo of Sherman's mom? Non-Jewish voters for not being presumed to love mom enough?
LA Observed says two of its readers believe the Sherman campaign Photoshopped his mom out of the non-Jewish flyer. There I don't want to go.
BuzzFeed has more from inside the Jewish mailer. There's the requisite photo-op with Benjamin Netanyahu, and also, oddly, one of Sherman mounting a camel in 1972. I'm guessing that Sherman -- who likes to self-deprecate about his pate by handing constituents combs -- is reminding them about his more hirsute youth.
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Knesset disagrees with Florida state legislature
When a Knesset committee rejected a proposal to extend Israeli law to West Bank settlements, did it leave Florida’s state legislature hanging out to dry?
On Sunday, the Knesset’s Ministerial Committee for Legislative Affairs batted down the bill, which ran into opposition from members of the governing Likud Party.
The Times of Israel reported:
The government on Sunday struck down a proposal by a Likud lawmaker to extend Israeli law to the Jewish communities beyond the Green Line, a move that frees the government from having to face claims it seeks to annex parts of the West Bank.
Likud MK Miri Regev had submitted a bill that, if passed, would have applied Israeli law to all officially recognized Jewish settlements in the West Bank — tantamount to a de facto annexation of Area C, the Israeli-controlled West Bank territories. Currently, Israeli law extends only to sovereign Israel, the Old City and East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights — not to the West Bank. The Jewish settlements are held under military rule.
“This bill is an unrealistic display, and for such displays we pay a heavy price in the international arena,” Likud lawmaker Benny Begin reportedly said.
Perhaps Begin didn’t realize, however, that in rejecting the bill, the Knesset arguably put itself in conflict with the vision for achieving peace offiicially endorsed by Florida’s state legislature.
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BDS and bullies
Gerard Donovan, an Irish novelist, was going to read in Jerusalem.
Then he got sick and couldn't go.
Which didn't prevent an Irish BDS group from chastising him in an open letter.
Donovan, reports the Irish Times, is appalled:
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Hoyer hearts Berman
We've covered the southern California face-off between Jewish Democratic Reps. Howard Berman and Brad Sherman.
We've also noted how in ways subtle and not so, the House leadership has indicated it favors Berman, the senior Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
And how both congressmen are vying hard for pro-Israel money.
So it all comes together today in this statement from Rep. Steny Hoyer, the House Minority whip, ahead of a vote urging the U.S. government to prevent a nuclear Iran and not simply contain it:
I thank the gentleman from California for yielding and for his leadership on this issue. Rep. Howard Berman has been the leader in Congress when it comes to reminding us how important it is to prevent the rise of a nuclear Iran. He has been instrumental in securing funding for the deployment of the 'Iron Dome' anti-missile system to counter the threat from Iranian-supplied short-range rockets in the hands of terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.
Note this is how Hoyer starts -- and by praising Berman for legislation not directly related to the bill at hand.
Not a formal endorsement -- leaders don't endorse in primaries, as a rule (although Hoyer endorsed Brad Schneider in IL10) -- but close.
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Oh no, Romney didn’t! (and in fact, he didn’t.)
"One Thing Hitler Did Right, According To Mitt Romney" is how BuzzFeed is headlining the video below, and Democratic activists are already taking it further and hitting my inbox with "Romney praises Hitler!" subject lines.
So, yes, there are bad people who praise Hitler as misunderstood.
And there are ignorant people who begin sentences, "if only he wasn't an anti-Semite ...," who don't get that Hitler starts and ends with "anti-Semite." One cannot imagine him as otherwise, one cannot imagine his crimes without understanding that he wanted to end the Jews.
And Mitt Romney is neither of these, in this 2007 video. Arguing for liquefied coal as an energy alternative, he mentions Hitler only to note that the technology existed as long ago as the 1940s, which is when Hitler planned to use it:
Liquefied coal -- Gosh, Hitler during the Second World War, I guess, because he was concerned about losing his oil, liquefied oil, that technology is still there.
Chalk this one up to innocuous.
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Mitt Romney’s Jewish girlfriend
This Washington Post Story, about Mitt Romney's prep school days, is setting the internets afire with its detailed account of a bullying incident he initiated.
Also revealed is Romney's schoolboy relationship with Mary Fisher, whose father, Max Fisher, more or less wrote the book on How to Be a Jewish Republican:
Romney was bowled over by the wealth of some of his friends. He briefly dated Mary Fisher, the daughter of the philanthropist and diplomat Max Fisher, who acted as a finance chairman to George Romney’s political campaigns. At her house, he watched the James Bond film “Goldfinger” in the family’s private theater before it was widely released. He reported excitedly back to (roommate Matthew) Friedemann about the theater, noting that the seats even had numbers.
(Snip)
“His altruism was apparent then and is apparent now,” said Candy Porter, who volunteered with Romney at the hospital. “I just remember him being really nice,” said Mary Fisher.
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Rep. Joe Walsh’s one-state solution
What would happen if a lawmaker advocated solving Israeli-Palestinian dispute with a one-state solution and encouraged one of the parties to the conflict to, well, leave to facilitate this outcome?
That's the position advocated by Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) Of course, in contrast to those critics of Israel who back a one-state solution, the one state that Walsh proposed in his Washington Times op-ed this past weekend would be uniformly "Israel" and the folks he would encourage to leave would be Palestinians. Should they decide to stay they would be subject to "limited" voting rights.
Walsh wrote:
Those Palestinians who wish to may leave their Fatah- and Hamas-created slums and move to the original Palestinian state: Jordan. The British Mandate for Palestine created Jordan as the country for the Palestinians. That is the only justification for its creation. Even now, 75 percent of its population is of Palestinian descent. Those Palestinians who remain behind in Israel will maintain limited voting power but will be awarded all the economic and civil rights of Israeli citizens.
This is a fairly surprising policy proposal -- at odds with the stated positions of the leaders of both the United States and Israel. So why the crickets, heard chirping here, by Robert Wright at the Atlantic.
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V.P. Joe Biden and Yair Lapid at the R.A. (Video)
Vice President Joe Biden spoke to the Conservative movement's Rabbinical Assembly this morning (the speech begins at the eight-minute mark):
Later in the day, television-personality-turned-aspiring-political-leader Yair Lapid addressed the convention. Lapid was speaking in the immediate aftermath of the huge shakeup of the Israeli political scene resulting from Kadima's entry into the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (the speech begins at the 14-minute mark):
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