Hardly a day goes by when we don’t hear another tragic tale about a young man yanking down his pants and trying to copulate with a light socket. Some blame Hollywood for making light socket sex seem so attractive. Others are calling for a ban on light sockets.

“No one ever said that having a light socket was a civil right,” said Mandy Gorbachev, the founder of Moms Against Bullying LGBT Whales. “When the Constitution was made up, no one even had light sockets or even lights.”

“The Founders may not have had light sockets,” bellowed Barry Burnbiter, of Burn Down America, while brandishing an oil lamp, “but they had light making appatus which they clearly wanted us to use. Light sockets don’t have sex with people. People have sex with light sockets. It’s a choice.”

“A horrible terrible choice that sometimes ends in electrocution and death,” screamed Panse Miers, a disgraced British newspaper editor banished to America for publishing photoshopped photos of Prince Charles having sex with a lightbulb socket. “I can’t sexually abuse my children in a country where having sex with Prince Charles is legal.”

The debate is continuing with everyone screaming at the top of their lungs on every channel. Sometimes these debates are interrupted by reports that another teenager died having sex with a light socket. Experts insist that they have no idea where the teens get the idea that it’s cool to have sex with light sockets. People who aren’t allowed on the news however have suggested that it might be the news.

Alley Wannabase, star of hit film, “Sex With Light Sockets is Sexy Hot” has appeared in a video, “Demand a Ban”, demanding that light sockets be banned. When asked about the contradiction, Alley said that light socket sex in movies is just a fantasy and shouldn’t be confused with people having sex with light sockets in real life.

America’s Big Bulb, Bazooka Ogawa challenged the light bulb socket industry to agree to restrictions including locks on all light sockets and background checks of anyone buying a lamp complete with a ten day waiting period.

Second-in-Command, Bongo Stevenson said that anyone who needed to have sex with more than one light socket at a time wasn’t a real man.

The threat of a lamp ban sent customers into every Sears and Target in the country clearing lamps, lava lamps and even rodeo saddles off every discount store shelf in the country.

Unfortunately a Senate bill to ban anyone from owning more than one lamp has already died in committee.

An appalled Melinda Gorbachev, who has no children but has seen many pictures of them and one day plans to adopt one from China, condemned Congress for being in thrall to Big Lamps and has vowed to redouble her efforts to keep lamps out of the hands of people.

I never know why people take Dennis Prager seriously. It has to be some kind of joke that Christians are playing on Jews by picking the dumbest Jew they could find and pretending that he’s a thinker.

Prager doesn’t think. He’s Chauncey Gardiner. A well meaning but dimwitted man who says pleasant things that are as deep as a greeting card. Usually it’s inoffensive. Prager is a Jewish Bill Cosby, the sitcom version not the real life version. If your grandma would knit it on a sampler, Prager is capable of expressing it. If there’s a dumb idea most people carry around, Prager will barf it up. The trouble is that Prager’s brand is Jewishness and he’s as Jewish as a ham sandwich on rye.

Being Chauncey, Prager can’t help but join the herd and write an article about how much he loves Christmas. And being an ass who trades on his Jewish roots to Christians, the damn thing is titled, “Why this Yeshiva Boy loves Christmas.”

Young Prager was in Morocco when he realized that he missed Christmas. A smart man would put that down to a generalized homesickness for all things American. But Prager spent years “thinking” about this phenomenon and coming to “conclusions”.

Growing up in an Orthodox Jewish home and in yeshivas (Orthodox religious schools where half the day was devoted to religious, and half the day to secular, studies), I had, of course, never celebrated Christmas. How, then, could I miss something that I had never had? How could I, raised in an Orthodox Jewish world, miss the quintessential Christian holiday?

I subsequently spent a lot of time reflecting on why this yeshiva boy would miss the Christmas season.

Answer 1. You’re homesick

Answer 2. You’re a bad Jew

But Young Prager could have been excused on 2 for being young. Old Prager has no such excuse. He’s just a bad Jew.

I came to two life-changing realizations.

Dennis Prager uses “life-changing realizations” the way other people yawn. Every damn thing is a life-changing realization for him.

“Honey, we’re out of raspberry yogurt. And that’s a life-changing realization because why are we so driven to need yogurt. What is yogurt anyway? And where do we go when we die? Will there be yogurt there?”

First, though my yeshiva world did everything possible to ignore Christmas — we had school on Christmas Day, and we had a “midwinter vacation” at the end of January instead of a Christmas vacation — I really liked the Christmas season.

Being a bad Jew is a life-changing realization, but Prager is not aware that he’s a bad Jew. So there is no life-changing realization.

He’s the teenager who realizes he likes ham and wants to keep on eating it, but doesn’t understand the implications of that.

My world in New York had consisted of an Orthodox home, Orthodox synagogue, Orthodox yeshiva, and Orthodox friends. In that world, one’s American identity was never denigrated, but it was largely ignored. And Christianity was entirely ignored (though it was an annual ritual in my home to watch the midnight Mass from Rome).

Dude, if your home had an annual tradition of watching the mass from Rome you were not Orthodox.

And what the hell does watching the mass from Rome have to do with an American identity? Most protestants in 1923 would say you were less American for it.

Until I was in college, my contact with Christianity was almost nonexistent — except for Christmas decorations and Christmas music. Morocco made me realize that I missed something Christian and that I felt profoundly American.

And that’s the point where you should have just converted and gotten it over with.

Also Americans don’t talk about feeling profoundly American. Anyone who talks like that is an immigrant who thinks that he feels profoundly American every time he goes to watch the fireworks go off on the Fourth.

As the years passed, I came to treasure this season and to fall in love with America and its distinctive values (what I call the American Trinity: Liberty, In God We Trust, and E Pluribus Unum). While director of a Jewish institution from 1978 to 1983, I volunteered to be Santa Claus for the Simi Valley Rotary Club, of which I was a member. So, during the same week that I led Sabbath services and study for about a thousand Jews, I also went to my Rotary Club meeting (what is more American than the Rotary Club?), and I was the Santa Claus for a local department store.

I’m not sure but I think this is why we used to have stonings. But you can’t stone a man whose head is already an impenetrable rock.

It is that season now, and I never fail to get goose bumps when I hear Burl Ives sing “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas,” let alone when I attend a performance of Handel’s Messiah, surely the greatest religious music ever composed. I love hearing people wish each other “Merry Christmas.” When my Jewish-day-school-attending children were young, I used to take them to see homes that had particularly beautiful Christmas lights.

Confessions of a shallow man #123.

Prager thinks this is meaningful when it’s just embarrassing. There’s no larger message here except that Prager’s parents failed to pass down their religion to their son and their son is failing to pass it down to his children. It’s the quintessential failure of American Liberal Jews on display here.

And yes despite Dennis Prager getting a candy cane in his pants for Christmas, he’s still a Liberal Jew and a secularist who is too dumb to realize these “life changing realizations”.

Those who wish to remove Christmas trees from banks and colleges and other places where Americans gather are not only attempting to rob the 90 percent of Americans who celebrate Christmas of their holiday, they are robbing this Jew, too.

This Jew has already been robbed of his Jewishness. There’s nothing left to rob him of but his lame adoration of the secularized trappings of a Christian holiday.

And I first realized all this in a Muslim country.

And somewhere in Milwaukee, a Jew from Morocco realized that he really does miss the sound of the Muslim Call to Prayer.

It’s that time of year again. Holiday Season. What holiday? Don’t ask too many questions. The devil is in the details, also on parts of Fifth Avenue and hanging around loitering suspiciously in the Wall Street area.

It’s that special Holiday time when families composed of a mommy and daddy who believe in different Gods (or more likely don’t believe in one at all) have to decide how many holidays they’re celebrating, in what order and why the Jews nailed Santa to a giant Menorah.

Sure they could have thought of this before they got married, but they were convinced it was going to be one of those simple little problems that could be solved with an affordable book from the STUPID LIFE DECISIONS section of the bookstore. And while there are no shortage of books, DVD’s and VCR instruction manuals on the subject… none of them get around the basic problem. Not even INTERMARRIAGE FOR DUMMIES or WORSHIPING DIFFERENT GODS TOGETHER FOR IDIOTS.

But we’re Americans. We want things solved quickly and we want them solved now. Like Iraq, or oil prices or TV dinners.

With that in mind, let’s harness the problem solving energy of an Iraqi TV dinner made out of Crude Oil with an IED stuck in the center… and solve this whole damn interfaith couple holiday celebration problem.

1. The Chanukah Bush

You’ve probably heard of the Chanukah Bush already. No it’s not what happens when George W. Bush lights a Menorah. It’s an attempt to combine an Ashera tree with a ceremony celebrating how the Jews drove the Greek Pagans out of the Temple. That’s right up there with trying to make a Black KKK. Sure you could do it, but it really misses the point.

But if you’re determined to degrade two sets of religious traditions in order to maintain the fiction that this whole mess is workable, here’s an easy guide to making your own Chanukah Bush.

First buy a Christmas Tree. Put lots of ornaments on it. Add a bunch of Menorah candles. Light them. Wait for the tree to begin burning. Try to put out the fire with a fire extinguisher. Stay close to the floor while crawling out of the nearest exit. Call the Fire Department. Collect your insurance money. Try to think of the experience as a metaphor for your marriage.

2. Talking to the Children

Sure you could go the circuitous route, but let’s cut to the chase. The best way to tell the children the truth is to be honest. Or we can just get it straight from the mouth of babes.

“Mommy and Daddy decided they loved each other more than God or their heritage, and so they got married. Except now Mommy calls Daddy a Kike, and Daddy calls Mommy a Shiksa, so that didn’t work out so well. Now at the end of every year we get a big batch of burned cookies shaped like Dreidels and Christmas Wreaths.”

3. Buy a Book

Everyone knows self-help books can surmount any problems. The Samurai Mohel recommends, Padre Rabbi Flannery O’Goldstein’s MOMMY IS A SHIKSA AND DADDY IS A KIKE. There are pop up pictures too, and an attached miniature fire extinguisher.

It doesn’t really matter because at 16 your kids will either become Zen Buddhists, Evangelical Christians, Orthodox Jews or Serial Killers. Or a few of those things at the same time. Don’t bother trying to fight it. It’s inevitable.

4. What the Hell Do We Do Now?

One of you could convert and repress your rage, while the other feels uncomfortable and begins to resent you right back. Or you could finally get that divorce you’ve been talking about. Or you could celebrate Festivus. Of course Festivus originated when a Seinfeld writer’s crazy father made them sit in the dark and traumatized them for hours, and like all childhood traumas eventually made for great comedy. You can also move to Easter Island, where every day is WORSHIP THE GIANT HEAD DAY.

5. I Don’t Have to Listen to This!

You’re right, you don’t. Close the page. It’s not that hard.

6. Judaism and Christianity are compatible.

Sure they are, just ask Rabbi Cardinal Shmuel Capistranno

7. I Wanted Useful Tips for an Interfaith Holiday

There is no such thing as an Interfaith Holiday. That’s an idea invented by marketing executives, just like using Holiday, instead of specifying which one you’re talking about.

Try telling someone you were born on a Holiday. Then when they keep asking you what Holiday, you keep repeating, HOLIDAY, WHAT ARE YOU DEAF?

There is no Chrismukkah or compatibility between Chanukah and Christmas except at the shopping mall where all holidays get rendered down into credit card debt and long lines. Chanukah and Christmas are not just traditions, they’re expressions of belief in two radically different visions and versions of history.

Christmas celebrates the birth of a deity the Jews supposedly killed, before the religion he spawned spread across the Greek and Roman world. Chanukah celebrates the Jews kicking the Greeks out of their country for trying to make them worship gods who were born, died and needed loincloths to cover up their embarrassing parts. Do you see the connection?

Chanukah and Christmas hate each other’s guts. If they were members of the same family, they would be in therapy. If you try to make your family celebrate both at the same time, you will be in therapy. Celebrating both at the same time is like trying to vote Democratic and Republican in one election. No matter how you try to make it work, eventually there will be a recount and your vote will only count once, if it’s even counted at all.

It’s possible to have an Atheist or Agnostic or Satanist family, but not an Interfaith family. If no single belief wins out, then what’s left is a big blank space.

20. What’s the Point of All This?

Suppose I have a Lexus and a Cadillac and I decide that they’re both such great cars that I want to drive them both at the same time. Now I’m obviously some kind of crazy rich Hillbilly, but that’s not the point. People try and tell me that I’m wrong, but I’m too drunk on moonshine to listen.

So I stick one foot in one car and one foot in the other. One hand in one car and one hand in the other. After a lot of acrobatics, I still can’t get either car started. Finally I decide that the only way to make my fantasy of a LexusCaddy come true, is by crashing one car into the other.

That’s exactly what I do. Two cars smash into each other in a crumpled mess of steel and leaking gasoline. Now I have an interfaith car.

Any questions? Direct them to Monsignor Rabbi Pierre Cohen at the Abbey of Our Lady of Perpetual Slivovitz. I’m done for for the evening.

Why is the sky blue?

Why is it sometimes pink?

Why does it sometimes turn black?

Why is there a Mormon blogger at the LA Jewish Journal and why does he offer hopelessly ignorant opinions about Judaism?

Do you see me offering my views on what Mormons need to do about their religion based on my knowledge of the religion based on a South Park episode and stuff I heard from Mormon critics?

But that doesn’t stop Mark Paredes from doing it. The topic is Women at the Wall, a group that I might almost sympathize with except for the fact that they really don’t care about praying, but do care about publicity stunts.

Everyone gave kudos to Rabbi Eliezrie for volunteering to be the Orthodox lightning rod for the evening, but I found his arguments less than compelling. His main justification for the denial of certain religious rights to women at the Western Wall was that “Jews have been praying this way for 3300 years, since the days of King Solomon.” Needless to say, his Reform and Conservative colleagues took exception to this statement. The night’s best line went to Rabbi Judith HaLevy, who noted that Jews don’t slaughter animals at the Western Wall today “even though they did it at the time of King Solomon.”

This has so much stupid in it that it’s over its accepted stupid weight.

I’m assuming that Rabbi Judy is a Reform Rabbi and has no clue about Judaism, but whatever Clown College turns out Reform Rabbis should still explain at some point between the two years of ecology, the one year of diversity and the one year with the Peace Corps that Jews (actual Jews from then until 1842) believe that sacrifices are held in abeyance until the rebuilding of the Temple.

Stupid laugh lines like these come from Stewart and Colbert politics. They’re an ignorant show of ignorance.

I can see why many Orthodox Jews are not impressed by liberal Jews’ willingness to change their traditions simply because they think that it’s a good idea to do so. However, invoking King Solomon to defend your practice of exclusion isn’t terribly convincing, either.

Look

1. Fuck you

2. It doesn’t have to be “convincing”. It’s what the religion is.

When people do something for 3300 years this is their way of doing it. That may sound circular to people who follow a religion made up by a guy in the 19th Century but even Mormons have their traditions. I may not like that tradition. Mark and Judy may not like our tradition, but that counts for fuckall because they are outside that tradition.

I am not going to walk into the big Saints cathedral and demand that they change things and if a Mormon critic tries that same stunt, I doubt very much that Mark will be on her side. Trying to hijack someone else’s sacred space and then demanding that they account to you for their traditions is typical liberal bullshit.

No one is obligated to account to anyone else for their traditions. Reform Judaism wrote out Jerusalem and the Temple from their religion. They can no longer demand any rights to them.

If they want to pray their way at a wall, they can build their own damn wall. They gave up this one when they gave up on the tradition.

However, on a night when only one prominent rabbi in the Los Angeles Orthodox world was willing to engage in a public dialogue on religious pluralism, I do feel comfortable offering an outsider’s opinion on which argument I found most compelling.

This is why. But no, not really. There’s no dialogue to be had on religious pluralism.

If you believe that the word of G-d is unchanging, then what is there to have a dialogue about with people who believe that it comes and goes any way you please? How can you even talk about pluralism if you reject the concept of plural approaches, some of which reject the word of G-d?

After all, while the Torah does state that priests in ancient Israel were male descendants of Aaron, modern Rabbinic Judaism doesn’t have priests, priesthood, or temples. Rabbis are teachers and decisors of Jewish law, not priests.

Mark’s thought process here was that he didn’t have to actually learn anything about Orthodox Judaism before writing about it. And that’s fine. Knowing what the hell you’re talking about is exclusionary.

Sure my synagogue has priests and they are called up first to the Torah and they bless the congregation. There are even regularly blessings by the priestly descendants of Aaron at the Western Wall… but Mark is probably right.

As a Mormon I believe that the Israelite priesthood has always been conferred exclusively on men, and I understand that men were almost exclusively the teachers and judges in ancient Israel, but in a modern world with many female teachers and judges, what is the theological objection to authorizing female rabbis if they don’t hold the priesthood?

How can a human being write up a sentence, a paragraph, a post, that is this contradictory without being aware that he’s doing it? Honestly it’s a mystery to me.

Mark Paredes believes that the priesthood, his Mormon priesthood, is conferred only on men. And then he asks what our objection is, in this modern world, to female Rabbis, because we couldn’t possibly have anything in our religion with as much standing as the Mormon belief that etc…

How can one man be this blithely stupid?

Our religion is our theology. Our theology is our religion. No religion or idea stands up to sufficient examination. You can deconstruct everything into piffle and that doesn’t make you smart, it makes you destructive.

Religion is faith and tradition. You are either part of it or you’re not. We can spend 4 days explaining it and it will end up right there after all the words are spilled out. Our religion is what we do. You don’t have to like it. You don’t even have to respect it. But you have to deal with it.

This is who we’ve been for 3300 years. These are the people whose traditions and scriptures you used as the basis for your own religion. And if you think that your religion has value, then maybe the original source of it has some value that you should respect as well without walking in like a tourist and gawking at all the funny Jews who still think like they did 3300 years ago.

We can argue theology and the place of X, Y and Z in Judaism, the logical paths that we took to get here, but really this is who we are. Deal with it.

No. No, no and no.

Talmudic scholars? Really?

The War of the Maccabees wasn’t the first ideological war in history. Not if by ideological war you mean a conflict over beliefs.

And Talmudic scholars? Even by the whole “Yaakov Avinu learned in Yeshiva for twenty years” school of logic this doesn’t pass muster. How do you have Talmudic scholars before the Mishna? How do you have Talmudic scholars before Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi?

The Maccabees were Kohanim. They were also scholarly. We know they were educated. But does Aish have to sell its BT learning programs with a statement so risible?

What’s the contradiction between being a Homosexual and an Orthodox Jew? As an idol worshiping adulterer, I don’t know the answer.

The problem is that we have two definitions of “Orthodox Jew”.

1) Orth-od-ox J-ew (Person who is non-judgmental and does many Mitzvos (kind deeds for others))

2. Orthodox Jew (Person who follows Torah)

“Of course, I am fully aware of the biblical injunction against homosexuality, and as a Torah-believing Jew, I accept that injunction as Jewish law. But why is this mitzvah different from all other mitzvot?” asks some columnist at the Times of Israel.

Duh, it’s not.

Of course I’m fully aware that there’s a biblical injunction against breaking the Shabbat but why can’t I drive to Shul each night and still be an Orthodox Jew?

If you have two identities. One is being an adulterer or idol worshiper or homosexual and the other is an Orthodox Jew, the two identities are not compatible. You have to choose one or the other. And if you talk about being a homosexual Orthodox Jew, then you have already made your choice. You are not an Orthodox Jew.

If violating the Torah is a more vital part of your identity than keeping the Torah, then you are not a Torah-believing Jew. We all make mistakes. I once cursed my parents while bowing down to Baal and then had sex with a donkey. It happens to everyone. But there’s a big difference between falling down on the job and defining an identity that says, “BREAKING SHABBAT IS PART OF WHO I AM. I WAS BORN THIS WAY. NOW TELL ME WHY YOU BIGOTS WON’T ACCEPT ME AS AN ORTHODOX JEW”

Doing something wrong does not take you off the list. Insisting that you are genetically bound to have sex with donkeys while bowing to Baal and that this is now your identity… and that we have to accept that is a load of donkey dung.

You can be an Orthodox Jew. You can be a bad Orthodox Jew. But not a Baal Worshiping/Donkey Humping/Orthodox Jew. Once you try and claim this identity, you are stating that you will not change and you want to create a modified religion and a modified Torah where donkey humping is cool.

They already have one of those. It’s called Reform Fracking Judaism. Once you go Reform, you never have to worry whether your donkey humping identity in any way interferes with your religion. There’s no polar yes/no black/white good/bad stuff there. So long as you don’t vote Republican, you’re in.

You can be an Orthodox Jew who is tempted to have sex with men, donkeys or the Amish. But you can’t be an Orthodox Jew who says, “I MUST HAVE SEX WITH MALE AMISH DONKEYS SO ACCEPT ME FOR WHO I AM”. An identity is not a mistake. It’s not a temptation. It’s who you are.

When someone says, “I am gay” and “I am an Orthodox Jew” those two identities nullify each other. You can be an Orthodox Jew who is tempted to have gay sex. You cannot be an Orthodox Jew who turns a violation of the Torah into a statement of identity.

But the Torah also prescribes death for some 25 other transgressions, including — to name but a few — cursing one’s parents (Exodus 21:17), ignoring the Torah-based rulings of a judge or court (Leviticus 17:12), and violating the Sabbath (Exodus 31:14, among other places). Yet, we don’t ostracize people who curse their parents or were held in contempt of even a Jewish court.

Oh but we would.

If someone cursed their parents all the time. If they turned cursing their parents into their identity. If they called themselves a “Motherfrakking Jew” and held “Motherfrakking Pride Parades” and wrote articles and made documentaries complaining that Orthodox Jews refuse to accept and tolerate Motherfrakking Jews… they would be gay.

In Israel, it is common to see people attend an Orthodox synagogue on Shabbat morning, and then spend the afternoon at a football game or the beach. That they do not observe Shabbat in an Orthodox manner does not keep them from receiving honors such as being called to recite the blessings on the Torah.

Yes and that’s a problem. It opens the door to crap like this. Then when the guy who just stabbed his parents 12 times after having sex with a donkey and worshiping Baal rides into an Orthodox synagogue on a donkey with a bloody knife in one hand and a Baal idol in the other… and is turned away by the judgmental Jews… the synagogue is vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy.

But should an openly gay couple enter and attempt to join the services, I shudder to think of the communal response.

Same response as a guy walking in with a football game blasting on a portable television.

There’s no hypocrisy here. Homosexuality as an identity is incompatible with Orthodoxy in the same way that you cannot walk into a synagogue and sit there with the game blaring so loudly that the Chazzan can hear it.

it is time for more of us in the Orthodox world to accept gay Jews as we do others who, like us, do not — and cannot — keep all of the mitzvot.

This is the one we’re waiting for. “Cannot”.

Why “Cannot” they? Because they were made different. Children of a gay god. And if we accept this identity, we have to modify our religion or believe that G-d made people who are programmed to sin and have no choice about it.

Speaking as someone who was genetically programmed to intermarry, eat bacon and worship Baal, I sympathize. I really do. So shut the hell up and stop writing these piteous articles telling us that it’s wrong not to accept homosexuality or that the basic incompatibility between Orthodox Judaism and Homosexuality is a myth.

It’s not a myth unless you think Torah is a myth. We all make mistakes, but we don’t turn a mistake into our identity. When you do that, what you are really saying is that it’s not a mistake at all… and maybe Torah is the mistake.

Dateline: Lots of Aqueducts and Togas

A new religion is spreading throughout the empire. Many Romans are converting or harmonizing with a funny little religion from a funny little people in a place the Empire calls Palestine.

The religion is a national religion, so it’s a poor fit. Across the Roman Empire, non-Jews play around with Judaism. They stop by synagogues, they discuss the ideas, they adopt some laws, eventually they make it their own. A blend of their religions with the foreign religion. They eventually call it Christianity.

Arabia

Dateline: Whole bunch of camels

Judaism is spreading across Arabia carried by Jewish refugees from the fall of Jerusalem and the wars following it, and the Arab mercenaries who went to help take it down, but brought back more than loot, they brought back ideas. Entire Arab tribes and a few kings begin practicing enough of the Jewish religion, that history will call them Jews.

The Jewish religion is just as incompatible with Arabia as it was in Rome. Just like in Rome, it fuses together into a new religion. Islam.

America

Dateline: Truth, Justice and the Walmart Way

Guess what’s going down dawg. Yo. Reform Judaism is off the hook. Ain’t too many Jews going into it, but if you want a relig that’s got no rules, but makes you feel special, it’s either this or go Presbyterian. You feel me?

Christianity and Islam happened because Judaism became popular with non-Jews. But Judaism can’t go non-Jewish. When it does a new religion is born. Get it?

What flavor of Judaism is so popular with non-Jews that it’s leaving Dimension J and is about to become its own religion. Yeah I know, Chabad, but let’s call that Plan C. If Chabad ever begins major conversions, we’re there. Now it’s Reform Judaism that is taking in a lot of non-Jews and is heading into a whole new place. New religions get born out of that place.

Reform Judaism shed the national stuff. It’s a place to get intermarried and where pasty girls named Rachel or Yael volunteer to drive hot meals down to the ghetto. It’s merging with the sang-froid zeitgeist of the vibeness of the age. It’s as American as apple pie and cowboys. It’s to America, what Christianity was to Rome and Islam was to Arabia. A religion that connects and isn’t tied down witha ll that Jew stuff.

Happy New Religion. Let’s see how many Jews this one kills.

There’s some debate online whether Gen Baugher is or isn’t a Holocaust denier. To recap for those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Generose Bogler Baugher is a California woman who takes a lot of photos. She’s visited a number of concentration camps and Holocaust related sites and her photos get sourced to a lot of other websites and on Wikipedia. Baugher formerly worked as an executive recruiter but she’s retired now and that gives her more time to run her Scrapbookpages.com site.

The name Scrapbookpages is innocuous and Gen Baugher’s initial descriptions seem impartial at first glance. When she takes issue with technical details, she does it in an unemotional voice. The juicier stuff appears in her blog which she runs as Further Glory where Holocaust deniers get quoted and in the comments she makes it clearer what she’s about.

Unlike most Holocaust deniers, Gen Baugher doesn’t openly present herself as a skeptic. Baugher poses as a source of information, including photos and her own commentary, where the denial comes in. Baugher doesn’t take a flat “Holocaust never happened” approach, instead she chips away at detail after detail, focusing on whether Jews were actually being killed as part of an extermination program or were just there as a compulsory labor force. Mixed in is a lot of commiseration about the plight of German civilians.

Is Gen Baugher a bigot? That’s harder to say. Holocaust denial attracts two types, bigots and kooks. There’s the David Duke types and the David Icke types. People who make a habit of being amateur skeptics and subscribing to conspiracy theories treat Holocaust denial as one more conspiracy by the man to pull the wool over their eyes.

Gen Baugher’s alternative health interests are an argument for kookery and she’s controversial in those circles too. But she also has a background in internet trolling on the alt.fan.oj-simpson newsgroup for the predictable reason and used racial slurs there and she was being accused of denying the Holocaust then back in 1996. Baugher’s MO then was the same. A detached impersonal voice that lent authority to her dubious claims cherry picked from even more dubious sources. And then the mask comes off.

Baugher also participated on alt.politics.nationalism.white and alt.politics.white-power. Most of it is gone now so there’s no way to know what Gen Baugher commented on “How to spot a Jew”. But what does survive has that same cagily creepy odor to it. There’s some German nationalism, some thinly disguised racism and anti-semitism. After her obsession with the Simpson case and a few other sensational crime cases, her focus has stayed with the Holocaust. Who knows why.

Baugher is German-American, but her parents were Americans, not Nazis, though their sympathies during the war are unknown, and they identified with their German heritage. She doesn’t like most minorities, is ill and has a lot of time on her hands. She might have gone into JFK conspiracy theories, instead she plays with Holocaust denial.

That’s her business, and it’s a free country, but the way she goes about it is dishonest. Someone like Toben is open about what he is but Baugher puts on a reasonable front that makes it easier to fly under the radar and embed her agenda. She’s a bigot and a kook, but her initial approach is innocuous enough that many sites don’t notice and treat her content as legitimate.

The internet is full of things, good and bad. The only real crime is misrepresenting your agenda. Gen Baugher is a denier pretending to be an amateur period historian.

This has been a Guest Post

But there’s dumb and then there’s really dumb. “From left to right, American Jews are criticizing Israeli anti-boycott law”

Backers of a new Israeli law penalizing anyone who targets Israel or West Bank settlements for boycotts tout it as a tool to fight back against anti-Israel campaigns, but American Jewish organizations seem remarkably united in deeming the measure an affront to freedom of expression.

Does Ron understand the difference between American Jews and American Jewish organizations? Or do you have to be a non-member of orgs to get that?

Okay how about from left to right? Ron quotes Morton Klein of ZOA who doesn’t know what the bill means and think it makes boycotts illegal. That is the only person, place or thing on the right that the article quotes. And it’s from someone who doesn’t understand the bill.

Does anyone at the JTA speak English? If you’re going to make the focus of your dumbass article a false claim that American Jews on the left and right oppose the bill, then you have to talk to more than one person on the right. And that person should know what the fracking bill does.

“Not since ‘Who is a Jew?’ ” has there been a controversy that could seriously strain relations between Israel and American Jews, said one pro-Israel heavyweight, referring to the early 1980s battle.

Not since 5 minutes ago has Ron Kampeas used an unsourced anonymous quote to shore up a bullshit claim that no one takes seriously for 5 minutes.

“Not since Ron Kampeas was caught shoplifting women’s panties at K-Mart has there been such a crisis that threatened the future of the JTA this much,” said one influential journalist in a bathroom stall. Does this mean the end of the JTA. Very probably.

JTA House Style, Represent!

Morton Klein, the ZOA’s president, said he was still examining the law, but that in principle the ZOA opposed anti-boycott laws.

“Nobody was more appalled by the boycott of Ariel theater than me, but to make it illegal? I don’t think so,” Klein told JTA, referring to calls by some Israeli artists to boycott a performing arts center in the West Bank settlement of Ariel.

Did Ron Kampeas misrepresent the bill in his phone call to Klein. And if he didn’t, did he happen to tell Klein that it doesn’t make boycotts illegal.

JTA Journalism, Represent!

Joining the ADL in issuing statements condemning the law were an array of dovish Jewish groups that included the New Israel Fund, J Street and Americans for Peace Now.

“When you start to persecute unpopular opinions, there really is no end point,” said Naomi Paiss, a spokeswoman for the New Israel Fund.

Yeah, next thing you know you’re persecuting unpopular countries and boycotting products from companies in them.

Until then. Meet your new President and his fake stache. Thomas L. Friedman!

Maybe it is just my friends, but I find more and more people completely disgusted by this situation and looking for a serious Third Party candidate who could run in 2012

No, no. It’s not just your friends who want you to run for President… because they’re mean people and think it would be really funny. All of America is just like them. Eagerly waiting for the Sage of the Ugly Gray Lady to get off his Vespa and save this country! Now.

The truth is, we need to do four things at once if we have any hope of maintaining American greatness:

Five things if you count hunting for spiders in Friedman’s stache.

We need more stimulus to keep the economy from slipping back into recession. But we need to combine that stimulus with a credible, legislated, long-term plan for cutting spending and getting the deficit under control

My Fellow Americans, we need to spend money like drunken sailors to save the economy and have a credible long term plan to cut spending and get someone up here to bring me my pants. Wait, what’s the third thing?

And we need to raise new revenues in order to reinvest in the sources of our strength: education, infrastructure and government-funded research to push out the boundaries of knowledge.

Those are the sources of our strength? What about plutonium?

The Thomas Friedman plan, raise taxes and spend more money on schools, highways and government funded research to resurrect Carl Sagan as a zombie. Also have a long term plan for cutting spending. It’s like the Obama plan to fix the economy, but with more Sagan zombies.

That’s right. We need to do four things at once: spend, cut, tax and invest.

It takes a truly superior mind to propose a bunch of contradictory things and call it a bold plan.

We need to mow the lawn, set the lawn on fire, make love to the lawn and take good care of the lawn. The Thomas Friedman way!

So what we’re basically saying as a country is that unless the market or Mother Nature make us pay, we are going to hand this whole bill over to our children.

But at least our children will grow up never having to read Thomas Friedman because all their lawns will be on fire as per Friedman’s 2013 Save Our Lawns By Setting Them On Fire initiative.

Maybe it is just my friends, but I find more and more people completely disgusted by this situation and looking for a serious Third Party candidate who could run in 2012 and deliver the shock therapy to the corrupt, encrusted, two-party duopoly now running the show in America.

…while bringing back the porn stache at the same time.

Take that corrupt encrusted duopoly! Here’s some shock and awe courtesy of Friedman’s facial hair.

Such a Third Party would have a simple agenda: 1) Inject a short-term stimulus. 2) Enact Simpson-Bowles. 3) Shrink our presence in Afghanistan. 4) Raise automobile mileage standards. 5) Impose a gasoline tax to pay for a massive increase in government-supported scientific research and a carbon tax to pay for new infrastructure and stimulate clean-power innovation.

So this third party would be the Democratic party and the Obama Administration, but with a snappier mustache.

Hope, Change and Stache

Do I think such a Third Party can win in 2012? Not likely. But it doesn’t have to win to be effective. If such a party attracted substantial voters on such a platform, it would shape the agendas of the Republicans and Democrats.

No it just has to siphon enough votes away from the Republican party by pretending to be a Third Party alternative so that Obama can win.