Stars: ****

I was interested in reading this book ever since I first read a review of it. I’ve seen so many reviews for it since that I can’t remember where I first saw it! I finally was able to fit time in to read it for the Bibliography challenge and Book Around the World challenge and I’m glad I did.

Stars: ****

I recieved this book from MotherTalk.

I asked to review this book because I’ve been intrigued by life in Muslim countries. I’ve read other books on Muslim culture so I asked to review this one.

A story in today's Times about George W. Bush's encounters with relatives of slain soldiers includes the following description of those meetings: "God is a frequent topic. Robert Lehmiller, also of Salt Lake City, says the president brought religion into the conversation, telling him, “If you truly believe the Scriptures, you will see your son again.” Although I probably should, I can't refrain from placing this comment in the context of the alleged belief of Islamicist suicide bombers that they will reach paradise quickly (and be greeted by 72 virgins). That is, I presume that for most of us that belief is just one more sign of irrational fanaticism. But what should we think of what presumably is the far more common belief in the US that there is indeed an afterlife in which one will be reunited with those one loved?

Today's Washington Post has an article that discusses "The Downside of Obama Strategy," i.e., that he actually has the audacity to believe that every Democrat's (and, perhaps, every American's) vote should count equally. The article notes (accurately) that Clinton has done better in large, electoral-vote-rich states than has Obama, which has ostensibly provoked fears about the prospects of his winning in November. It doesn't matter that he has received more popular votes than Clinton in contested elections--which allows us to omit Michigan and Florida--and, of course, that he has won more delegates. All that matters, according to a number of quoted Clinton supporters, is the vote in large states. So what we have is an attempt to apply to the nominating process the Electoral College's effective disenfranchisement of those unlucky enough to live in states where they are the political minority and the insane emphasis on a relatively few "battleground" states . One gather that Clinton will lose to Obama in today's caucuses in Wyoming. But, hey, it doesn't matter what Wyoming Democrats think, because they live in a Republican state.

The audience for Mitt Romney's speech on faith in politics was Christian conservatives in the upcoming Republican primaries, and hardly anybody else. As if on cue, Hugh Hewitt immediately pronounced the speech as "simply magnificent, and anyone who denies it is not to be trusted as an analyst."

Today it's colder than Boston in January, so I got home a bit early to stoke the woodstove. In the mailbox is an envelope announcing "You were right, Cervantes, the news media are biased -- just not in the way you think." Uh huh. I open it up and it's an ad for the Christian Science Monitor.

Here's my unsolicited advice: wait to become a Christian Scientist until after you've had your appendix out.

Won't get back to the mind/body thing until tomorrow. As you may have heard, researchers have to spend all their time writing proposals. I'm no exception and I'm in the middle of three of them, all due at the same time. So catch up with me on Friday.

Hillary Clinton (pictured wearing the hat of her "favorite" MLB team) is expected to announce on Saturday that she is giving up her Democratic presidential ambition and will support expected nominee Barack Obama. (Not a surprise she is waiting until Saturday, as today is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.)

I would bet that she will NOT be Obama's choice to be his vice presidential running mate, as the Obamas don't want the baggage that comes with her (aka Bill), and she doesn't want to be vice president anyway. (Obama needs a running mate who appeals to the two most important groups he still needs to win over from John McCain: Independents and Conservative Democrats. That's not Hillary.) I would bet in the long run she's hoping that Obama loses in November so she could run again in 2012.

Hillary Clinton is evidently running for the Republican nomination for president. Monday, she met with Richard Mellon Scaife -- yes, the very architect and financier of the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy, the man behind the Whitewater hoax, the man who spent millions of dollars promoting the story that Hillary Rodham Clinton had Vince Foster murdered -- now the publisher of a commercially non-viable far right-wing vanity newspaper, and used the occasion to denounce Barack Obama for being a member of Jermiah Wright's church.

Today, I read this in the Washington Post: "[Like John McCain] Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign has also started slapping the L-word on Obama, warning that his appeal among moderate voters will diminish as they become more aware of liberal positions he has taken in the past, such as calling for single-payer health care . . . ."

It's not very surprising that a recent poll finds that 28% of Clinton supporters would vote for John McCain if Obama is the nominee, since it has been the Clinton strategy for several weeks now to endorse John McCain over Obama.

It's here! Challenge graphic coming soon.

Check out all the details here.

Basically I'm reading a minimum of three books from March 1/08 - June 1/08

1. How Big Is Your God by Paul Coutinho
2. Spiritual Parenting by David Carroll
3. The Way of the Labyrinth by Helen Curry
4. The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck (Also A to Z)
5. A Woman in Jerusalem by A.B. Yehoshua spiritual? (Also for Jewish Literature)
6. A Year Inside Radical Islam by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross (Also for In Their Shoes)

I'm like, scratching my head. Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination for president, correct? The nomination will be awarded officially by delegates to the Democratic National Convention, the delegate selection process is over, and the majority of the delegate votes at the convention belong to people who will vote for Obama. Ergo, QED, therefore, ipso facto, a fortiori and you can take it to the bank, Senator Obama will be the nominee.

So Hillary Clinton takes the occasion to announce:

She is the candidate who will be the best president;
She is asking people to continue to donate to her campaign;
She will decide on the future of her campaign in the coming days, based on what the people who voted for her want her to do;
That the voters of South Dakota have had the last word in the primaries, even though the polls in Montana were still open at that very moment;
That more people voted for her than had ever voted for a candidate in a primary -- even though more people voted for Obama than for Hillary Clinton.

Almost assuredly not. In fact, neither Senator Clinton nor Senator Obama is likely to be even halfway to the required total of 2023 delegates by then, and the delegate difference between them on February 6th is likely to be quite small.

The leading candidates from both parties in this presidential election make a point of emphasizing their religious convictions, which naturally raises questions about what role their beliefs will have in their decisions as President. A president who believes that Armageddon is just around the corner may see herself as a heroic instrument of God’s plan, and act accordingly (if you scoff at this, you are not paying attention). This prospect is unsettling to non-believers, as well as to adherents of minority religions.

In that regard, consider comments by Father Robert Araujo on the Mirror of Justice, a blog by law professors on issues of Catholic Legal Theory. In the context of addressing the possible relevance of eschatological beliefs to issues of global warming, Father Araujo writes:

A Wall Street Journal columnist today suggests that “Obama’s ‘Identity’ Beat Hillary’s ‘Identity.’” His argument is that the Democratic party is dominated by identity politics, and Senator Clinton lost because the race card beat the sex card.

The columnist claims, furthermore, that Obama (influenced by legal theorists at Harvard) sees matters in terms of identity politics, regardless of his professed desire to move beyond it. The columnist writes:
After South Carolina, the campaigns accused each other of playing the race or gender card. Obama deflected this charge. "I don't want to deny the role of race and gender in our society," Obama said. "They're there, and they're powerful. But I don't think it's productive."

I'm not convinced. I think Barack Obama is more inclined to interpret American life in the formal categories of identity politics than is generally thought, or even than would older "conventional liberals" like Al Gore or John Kerry. Legal theorists have been a main source of its ideas; it's hard to imagine that Barack and Michelle Obama didn't hear a lot about "marginalized constituencies" at Harvard Law School. Sen. Obama may not be so conventional after all.

Apparently everyone is up in arms over the fact that John McCain was born in the Panama Canal zone in 1936. Is he a "natural born citizen" eligible to be President under Article II, section 1, clause 4 of the Constitution?

I have to tell you, frankly, that whether McCain is "natural born" is the least of our worries. If you are truly an originalist, as I am, nobody is eligible to be president today.

I recently took Ed Whelan's simple one question test to determine whether you are really an originalist and confirmed that, yes, I am one of that proud and hardy band.

Q. The Constitution provides, as one of the criteria to be eligible to become president, that a person must be a "natural born Citizen" (or, alternatively, in a provision that long ago ceased to apply to any living persons, "a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution") How would you figure out what the phrase "natural born Citizen" means?

Our good friend Jean, in response to my asking for contributions to President Obama's "to do" list, proposes honest, effective, and comprehensive health education. I think that's an excellent addition. Although I'm afraid it may be too hot to handle for the campaign, it's something we're going to need to address after the dust settles in January.

If we're going to have honest and effective health education, it has to start with honest and effective biology education. And here, we have a problem. Michael Berkman and colleagues in the May PLoS Biology lay the bad news on us. Sixteen percent of U.S. high school biology teachers admit to believing that "God created human beings in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years," and 47%, while agreeing that humans developed over millions of years, believe that God guided the process, and one in eight say they teach creationism in a positive light.

Sen. McCain says, "Al Qaeda is in Iraq. It’s called ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq.’ My friends, if we left, they wouldn’t be establishing a base. They’d be taking a country, and I’m not going to allow that to happen." He's running largely on the strength of his claimed foreign policy expertise. He says -- and he reiterated yesterday -- that if the United States withdraws from Iraq, al Qaeda will take over the country.

The pundits and so-called "reporters" who work for the corporate media, including, as in the link above, the New York Times, aren't going to tell you that this is completely nuts. They treat this analysis as credible and therefore, undoubtedly, many people will believe it.

Oh Boy Obama is the unofficial campaign think-tank. Created by Obama supporters for the purpose of giving the Obama grassroots a platform to submit and vote on ideas to better the 2008 primary and general election campaign of Barack Obama. All supporters are welcome to contribute.

Title: My Name is Red
Author: Orhan Pamuk
ISBN: 0375706852
Publisher: Vintage International/2001
Pages: 413

I had started this book in January. For some reason, it stayed at page 43 for a few months. I again picked it up in April. I only read upto page 59. However, finally I decided to finish it this week. Today I did. You can say that I plodded through the book. It could only hold my interest after I had read it half way through.

YouTube Video of Obama Speech Today.
Transcripts of Speech

Today Obama gave an impassioned speech on race and responded to the comments from the media asserting that that he agrees with his pastor Wright's inflammatory views on the U.S. and racism. He reminds us all that there is hope in a better tomorrow, but also tells us how we can get there. Even if he isn't the candidate for you, I think his message is very important for everyone to hear.

First of all, sorry for being away, it's end of the semester, student papers to read, proposals to write, conferences to attend -- blogging always ought to come first, but I'm just irresponsible I guess.

Anyhow, today's Sunday Sermonette concerns the greatest peculiarity of our faith-based politics. That is the idea that politicians have to continually proclaim their piety, but it doesn't matter what they actually believe, as long as they are religious. This was the essence of Mitt Romney's big speech last week -- in America, it doesn't matter what religion you believe in, as long as you believe in one. He was introduced by George Bush the First, who is on record as saying that atheists should not be permitted to hold public office in the United States.

According to the Obama campaign, he won 845 of the 1671 pledged delegates last night, to Senator Clinton's 836. This appears to be roughly consistent, give or take a few delegates, with others' estimates, as well -- see here and here. When added to his previous 63-48 lead, that would give Obama a 908 to 884 lead in pledged delegates. (There are seven more delegates to be chosen from Democrats abroad who voted yesterday.)

Only 1428 pledged delegates are still to be chosen in the remaining primaries and caucuses. Thus, in order to enter the convention with a majority (2025 delegates), Senator Obama would need to win 1117 of those remaining delegates, or over 78 percent. Senator Clinton would need to win 1141 delegates, or 80 percent. Obviously, neither of the candidates is going to secure anywhere close to a majority before the August convention. It is more likely that each will end up with between 1500 and 1700 pledged delegates, i.e., at least 300 delegates short of what they need to win.

Over at the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson gets what is at stake in the 2008 election-- a reconstructive presidency:

Obama's candidacy not only threatens to obliterate the dream of a Clinton Restoration. It also fundamentally calls into question Bill Clinton's legacy by making it seem . . . not really such a big deal.

That, I believe, is the unforgivable insult. The Clintons picked up on this slight well before Obama made it explicit with his observation that Ronald Reagan had "changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not."

Rachael Ray recently profiled Barack and Michelle Obama for a segment on her talk show. The media is all worked up about the fact ath Barack said that his daughters think his candidacy is boring. Rachael and the Obamas discuss how they make time for their family during the campaign and how their two daughters, Malia, 9, and Sasha, 6, feel about the race.

Check out some video from the interview:

One of the few benefits of getting older is gaining perspective from the passage of time. What strikes me most about the large scale changes that have taken place in the course of my adult life are not those related to terrorism or torture or the conservative grip on the Supreme Court, but rather the shift in the economic structure of the country. We’ve all heard about the increasing disparity between rich and poor, which is a part of this shift, but it goes beyond that, as Joshua Holland details in this report:

Fewer than 1 percent of Americans are millionaires, but almost one in three believe they'll end up among that group at some point.

I don't want to distract our readers from the very important story about the Administration's stonewalling of the 9/11 Commission -- read about the New York Times's essential story and the Zelikow Report here -- but this is very much worth your attention, too:

Continuing his invaluable work, Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe today publishes responses of nine presidential candidates to a series of questions he posed about the topics that have dominated this blog since 2004. I'll add some highlights here shortly -- in the meantime, go read the responses.

The headlines -- most of them, anyway -- are saying that Senator Clinton beat Senator Obama 51% to 45% in the Nevada caucus contest today. Except that some reports say Senator Obama "won," 13 delegates to 12. What's up? There's a debate going on over at Matt Yglesias's blog (and elsewhere, too, I venture to guess -- especially among the spinners).

Well, there are at least three different metrics by which today's contests could be evaluated.

Apologies to my hordes of disappointed readers for the lacuna. My Intertubes were blocked on Tuesday -- or, to put it in less technical terms, our ISP had an all-day, city-wide outage. I had the chance to post from elsewhere in the evening but I said to heck with it. Yesterday, the problem was in the wetware. I think I was just so depressed and disgusted by the completely idiotic and repulsive coverage of politics on TV that my neural circuits were sputtering fecklessly. The link is to Glenn Greenwald, writing coherently.

Anyhow, both the ISP and I have rebooted, so before I do a public health post later today, let me just put in my two cents on the presidential campaign. Nothing terribly original, just the same open letter to Hillary Clinton I know you would write as well.

Dear Senator Clinton: You have already made history as the first woman to run a truly credible campaign for the presidency. You have staked out substantive positions on many issues, and your campaign has simultaneously transcended gender and championed gender equality. Good for you. The next woman to run for president will find the way smoothed by your precedent. Chris Matthews has been chastened (to some extent) and it won't be a novelty, it will just be a presidential campaign.

In a week's time, I leave this house where I have lived for 14 years. It is my parents house. My dad passed away in 2002 and I live with my mom. Both of us are moving to be nearer to my younger brother. We will stay apart yet near. In India family is important. In a way, I never left home, always living with my parents and then only mom. My three brothers come home, on and off. I am the permanent fixture. Although I am the third child, I am treated as the youngest one by my family.

Enough about that. I had started reading My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk, in January, I think. Somehow it just receded to the background. I again picked it up this week. I am in the middle of it. This is not an easy read. Not by substance or by font.

According to the book Blurb: