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My entries:

The Birthers would have us believe
Obama, when he was conceived
His mom was in Kenya
With such an agenda
She took more than nine months to leave

The People’s Republic of China
Why can’t it be gentl-ah and kind-ah?
Chairman Mao was a brute
He gave not a hoot
How many were sent to the grind-ah

Schott’s Vocab Is Splendid Because
He wants us to make no faux paux
“Use ‘Darwin’ and ’surge’
But don’t get the urge
To send me an x-rated clause”

What a con man was Bernie Madoff
As with people’s money he made off
Now he sits in a cell
And if he behaves well
He will still not get any time off

As Polanski fights extradition
He appears to show no contrition
He’s a dirty old man
Who’s been on the lam
Who decent would back his position?

An attempt to blackmail Dave Letterman
Was made by a man named Joe Halderman
Joe needed the money
Knew one of Dave’s “honeys”
So which of the two is the better man?

Obama as Icarus

To help make his hometown Oh-lym-pian
Obama did fly to Co-pin-hagin
He flew too near the sun
‘Twas Rio who won
Now he’s lost his wings, too bad for him!

One benefit of the fallout from Wilson’s attack is that, in people’s reactions, we get to see who the real racists are, like Rush Limbaugh.  (As if we didn’t already know!)  This is a very ugly situation we are in.  The Republicans would do well to stay clear of this, especially from what have become racist code words.  This is not the return of Lee Atwater.  Willie Horton was not a stand-in for Michael Dukakis.  This is not Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”.  This is personal.

George W. Bush was a stalwart supporter of civil rights,  and he practiced what he preached.  Republicans would do well to follow his good example instead of repudiating it.

And what did these paragraphs consist of?  Health Care Insurance Horror Stories.  Well, there are also Health Care Horror Stories, Hospital Horror Stories and the like.  I don’t need to hear anecdotes.
Obama wants to ram the whole thing through. He told Congress last night that he was not the first president to try to reform health care, but he is determined to be the last.  I think he should start at the bottom and work up.

We elected a president, not a king.  Just because Obama says or thinks something is true doesn’t automatically make it so.  Unfortunately, the Republicans are good at heckling and not much else.  Hopefully, “centrists” like Joe Lieberman (my favorite) can slow down the “Obama Express”, which is beginning to look more and more like a train wreck.

Another time, we were discussing in a departmental meeting what role students should have in running the department. Ever the mathematician, Simons decided to start with the first grade and work his way up. He said, “Well we can all agree that first graders should not be running the first grade,” to which my good friend and fellow “warm body”, Hugo d’Alarcao, a true Marxist if there ever was one, responded, “Why Not?”

I became friends with another mathematician, Barney Glickfield, as we worked in the same field. He was a very humorous fellow. He had taught at the University of Washington, but was job-hunting. At some math meeting, I can’t remember which one, I arranged for him to have an interview with Simons. As Barney told it, the interview was very short.

Simons: Are you fantastic?
Barney: No, but neither are you.
Simons: That’s true, but I’m the Chairman

I didn’t take well to my non-renewal. I sent out an announcement to some friends and former teachers that I had “Published and Perished”. The mantra in academe, then as now, was “Publish or Perish.” I could have stayed for the academic year ‘70-’71, but I decided instead to accept a visiting position at Kansas State University, arranged by my former teacher and good friend, Karl Stromberg.

So, in the summer of 1970, Hugo d’Alarcao, I, and another friend drove to the Southwestern U.S. At the end of the trip, they flew back to New York, and I made my way to KSU. On our way through Kansas, we stopped at Dodge City. I got a postcard with a picture of “Boot Hill”, which Hugo and I signed and mailed to Simons with the inscription “Wish you were here!”

The last time I saw Simons was at an American Math Society meeting in San Antonio in 1980. He and Bill Thurston shared a prize, and they did an unintended comedy routine on stage. Simons made some funny remarks, one of which was just after he opened the envelope with the check for the prize money. He said something to the effect that, “Last night in New York before flying down here, I thought that it would be OK to tell some friends that I had won this prize, and I asked them, ‘How much is it for? How much money?’ And no one seemed to know.” “I guess we’ll leave that as an open question.” he intoned, as he put the check back in the envelope.

After the Awards ceremony, I went down to the front of the auditorium, shook Simons’ hand and and congratulated him. He seemed a bit taken aback, I guess because of the “Wish you were here” business. But hey, he deserved the Award. It was for joint work with S. S. Chern, one of the greatest. And what are “warm bodies” for anyway, if not to be dispatched when the time comes?

I knew that Simons had gone into the money-making business in the early ’80’s and had eventually left mathematics (as a vocation, but not as an object of philanthropy), taking several other mathematicians with him. But I had no idea of the extent of his success until I read a recent article($) in the New York Times, stating that he had made $1.7 billion last year. I tried to get his email address (Fat chance of that! I could try “snail mail”, but that’s so, oh, Twentieth Century.) If I could send him an email message, here is what it would say:

Dear Jim:
Congratulations on being a mega-billionaire. Have you ever considered paying “reparations” to all those “warm bodies” you dispatched while building up the department at Stony Brook? (Just kidding!) Best wishes for continued success, and in the meantime, don’t be a hedgehog.

“At the top [of this year's list of the 25 highest paid hedge-fund managers, published by Alpha magazine], was James Simons of Renaissance Technologies with $1.7 billion.
Simons used to crack codes for the U.S. Defense Department before moving on. Good luck to him. It is clearly more lucrative to detect small pricing anomalies in the Polish zloty or penny stocks – piling into them with your clients’ billions – than to ponder clandestine North Korean signals.”

It is true that Simons worked for a time at the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) in Princeton, NJ, but it is more accurate to say that he was a Ph.D. mathematician, and a very good one at that. After leaving IDA, he became chairman of the Math Department at S.U.N.Y., Stony Brook, on Long Island. (Now the University at Stony Brook) I was an Assistant Professor there for four years after getting my Ph.D. in 1966. In those days Stony Brook was “on the make”, and I, along with others, served as a “warm body”, someone who could get the job done until being replaced by someone better. One thing they were lacking was a “name” chairman, which they kept trolling for.

Simons was interviewed in the Spring of 1968, and gave a colloquium talk. I introduced him as Professor James Simons of Princeton University, to which he responded “Forget the ‘Professor’, forget the ‘Princeton’”. At any rate, he was offered and accepted the chairmanship (The joke at the time was that we had a better than average chance of landing him, since he was at the moment unemployed!), and he succeeded in building up a very strong Department. A few anecdotes:

During the 1969-70 academic year, I happened to rent a house near his. I was non-renewed in the Spring of 1970 (to be effective a year later). One day, before I was officially given the ax, he dropped me off at my house , and he commented “Gee, what a nice place. I hope we can keep it in the Department.”

(to be continued)

The New Republic, 2004, endorsing Joe Lieberman for President:

“But one day, Joe Lieberman’s warnings in this campaign will look prophetic. And the principles he has espoused will once again guide the Democratic Party. It will be the work of this magazine, to whatever small degree possible, to hasten that day.”

TNR’s Jonathan Chait, in The Los Angeles Times, 2006, viciously condemning those who mounted a primary challenge against Lieberman (an “anti-Lieberman jihad”) :

“[T]he anti-Lieberman campaign has come to stand for much more than Lieberman’s sins. It’s a test of strength for the new breed of left-wing activists who are flexing their muscles within the party. These are exactly the sorts of fanatics who tore the party apart in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They think in simple slogans and refuse to tolerate any ideological dissent.”

TNR’s Chait, last month:

“A few weeks ago, Senator Dianne Feinstein announced that she and other Senate Democrats harbored reservations about President Obama’s plans to overhaul the health care system. . . . The reaction from the left was swift and, by the standards of such things, furious. Which is to say, not very furious. . . .

I have a suggestion for something that would be productive: run a primary challenge against her. . . . The possibility of a primary challenge could [also] balance out [Sen. Evan] Bayh’s incentives, thus aligning them more with those of the national party. . . . Primary electorates consist of a small, highly partisan subset of the electorate, and the prospect of submitting themselves to a partisan loyalty contest terrifies centrists like Bayh.”

TNR’s Chait, this week :

“But if health care reform fails, liberals need to understand who to blame and how to fix it. They need to start knocking off Democrats like Conrad and Joe Lieberman, who seem to be trying to kill health care reform, even if this temporarily costs the Democrats some seats. . . . If health care reform can’t pass now, then a filibuster-proof Democratic majority isn’t worth having. At that point you have to consider blowing up the party and waiting a decade or two to rebuild a new one that’s able to address the country’s actual needs.”

My, what a rapid and total reversal — one effectuated without the slightest acknowledgment that it even occurred.  But that’s just the accountability-free nature of Beltway punditry.  There’s a more important point highlighted here:  namely, it is a sign of how dysfunctional the Democratic Party is — and how meaningless is their glorious super-majority — that even The New Republic, which long prided itself on safeguarding the Party from nefarious left-wing influences, is now calling for “centrist” Democratic Senators (even including Joe Lieberman) to be thrown out of office by means of primary challenges (I believe that was once called a “purity purge”), even if doing so results in a loss of Democratic seats.  Chait’s rationale is that allowing “centrist” dominance within the party means that the same corporate interests (rather than the interests of constituents) and the same political agenda end up being served regardless of which party is in control, meaning that — as he put it — even “a filibuster-proof Democratic majority isn’t worth having” because nothing meaningful changes.  You don’t say.

That, of course, was exactly the motivating premise of those who sought to remove Joe Lieberman from the Senate in 2006 — the people Chait demonized back then as “left-wing fanatics” who “refuse to tolerate any ideological dissent.”  That was also the animating principle behind the founding last year of Accountability Now , largely designed to recruit and enable meaningful primary challenges against corrupt, unaccountable, and worthless corporate-serving incumbents.  …

Here are my comments.

a)  The successful campaign by Ned Lamont against Lieberman in the 2006 Democratic primary was motivated solely by Lieberman’s hawkish stance on the Iraq war.  He retained the support of African-Americans and unions, who paid more attention to his domestic voting record than to Net Roots. Barack Obama campaigned for him.  His domestic voting record was virtually identical to that of his Senate colleague, Chris Dodd.

b) Lieberman’s decision to run (successfully) in the general election as an Independent Democrat was motivated in part by his strong ego. (Please let me know me if you find a senator who doesn’t have one.)  However, he caucused with the Democrats in 2007  and 2008, allowing them to maintain control of the Senate.

c) Lieberman’s campaigning with John McCain and speaking at the Republican National Convention was a bit over the top, to be sure.  His “mirror image” in the Senate, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, a vocal opponent of the war, did not endorse Obama in the presidential race.  After the election, Obama saw to it that Lieberman retained his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee.  After all, the Department of Homeland Security was his “baby”‘.

d) The current flap over health care reform involving Lieberman, Feinstein and others, is a different matter.  Does their failure to join the health care stampede make them “corrupt, unaccountable, and worthless corporate-serving incumbents”.  Certainly not!  I believe both Lieberman and Feinstein to be people of the utmost integrity.  I’m afraid I can’t say the same about Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi.

I have written many posts about Lieberman.  I have to confess he is my favorite politician.

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East”. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled”. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

This bizarre episode occurred while the White House was assembling its “coalition of the willing” to unleash the Iraq invasion. Chirac says he was boggled by Bush’s call and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”

After the 2003 call, the puzzled French leader didn’t comply with Bush’s request. Instead, his staff asked Thomas Romer, a theologian at the University of Lausanne, to analyze the weird appeal. Dr. Romer explained that the Old Testament book of Ezekiel contains two chapters (38 and 39) in which God rages against Gog and Magog, sinister and mysterious forces menacing Israel. Jehovah vows to smite them savagely, to “turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws,” and slaughter them ruthlessly. In the New Testament, the mystical book of Revelation envisions Gog and Magog gathering nations for battle, “and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”

In 2007, Dr. Romer recounted Bush’s strange behavior in Lausanne University’s review, Allez Savoir. A French-language Swiss newspaper, Le Matin Dimanche, printed a sarcastic account titled: “When President George W. Bush Saw the Prophesies of the Bible Coming to Pass.” France’s La Liberte likewise spoofed it under the headline “A Small Scoop on Bush, Chirac, God, Gog and Magog.” But other news media missed the amazing report.

Subsequently, ex-President Chirac confirmed the nutty event in a long interview with French journalist Jean-Claude Maurice, who tells the tale in his new book, Si Vous le Re’pe’tez, Je  De’mentirai (If You Repeat it, I Will Deny), released in March by the publisher Plon.

Oddly, mainstream media are ignoring this alarming revelation that Bush may have been half-cracked when he started his Iraq war. My own paper, The Charleston Gazette in West Virginia, is the only U.S. newspaper to report it so far. Canada’s Toronto Star recounted the story, calling it a “stranger-than-fiction disclosure “ which suggests that apocalyptic fervor may have held sway within the walls of the White House.  Fortunately, online commentary sites are spreading the news, filling the press void.

The French revelation jibes with other known aspects of Bush’s renowned evangelical certitude. For example, a few months after his phone call to Chirac, Bush attended a 2003 summit in Egypt. The Palestinian foreign minister later said the American president told him he was “on a mission from God” to defeat Iraq. At that time, the White House called this claim “absurd.”

Recently, GQ magazine revealed that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld attached warlike Bible verses and Iraq battle photos to war reports he hand-delivered to Bush. One declared: “Put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground.”

It’s awkward to say openly, but now-departed President Bush is a religious crackpot, an ex-drunk of small intellect who “got saved.” He never should have been entrusted with the power to start wars.

For six years, Americans really haven’t known why he launched the unnecessary Iraq attack. Official pretexts turned out to be baseless. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction after all, and wasn’t in league with terrorists, as the White House alleged. Collapse of his asserted reasons led to speculation about hidden motives: Was the invasion loosed to gain control of Iraq’s oil, or to protect Israel, or to complete Bush’s father’s vendetta against the late dictator Saddam Hussein? Nobody ever found an answer.

Now, added to the other suspicions, comes the goofy possibility that abstruse, supernatural, idiotic, laughable Bible prophecies were a factor. This casts an ominous pall over the needless war that has killed more than four thousand young Americans and cost U.S. taxpayers perhaps $1 trillion.

James A. Haught is the editor of the Charleston Gazette
(end of article)

First, I would like to give my reasons for believing the story.

a) The citation of the article in Allez Savoir is correct. It appeared, along with an editorial.

b)  How could Chirac and his staff manufacture a story like that?  Especially since they had to recruit a Swiss theologian to explain it to them.

Second, I would like to try to put a “benign” spin on the story. (The conservative response is “We have the real messiah as president now, so who cares?”)

It is clear that George W. Bush intended to invade Iraq no matter what, as he told the Spanish Prime Minister.  This not withstanding the fact that U.N. inspectors were on the ground, and that there was some indication that Saddam and family might abdicate.  Bush’s handlers/enablers had their reasons, but it isn’t clear what his was(were).  He certainly knew that Chirac was implacably opposed to joining the “Coalition of the Willing”, so he decided to play the “bible card”, hoping that religion would trump politics with M. Chirac.  Which it didn’t.

Am I clever, or what?

Your comments are right on the mark. Limbaugh is not simply an entertainer. And his so-called logic is atrocious. The MSM continues to embrace him, and he has more listeners than ever.  Recently, he compared Obama to Hitler. Father Coughlin was reined in by the Detroit Bishop, but I fear that the only way Limbaugh will be stopped is by his own excesses. And this may take a while. (end of comment)

I have had numerous posts, including a video, on Limbaugh.

Mitch Albom is way off on this one. For example: False equivalence with the sixties, smearing all legislators for the crimes of a few.

There were protesters at one town hall meeting who refused to believe that Medicare is a government-run program.  Were protesters in the 60’s and 70’s that ignorant? I don’t think so,   Also, the stakes were a lot greater then. Obamacare isn’t killing anyone, although some ignoramuses like Sarah Palin claim that it will.

Most of the protesters are an angry, ignorant mob; they don’t like Obama and are spurred on by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, who recently compared Obama to Hitler!  Obama is seeking healthcare reform in a legal manner, and he is not trampling on anyone’s civil rights in the process.

But I fear my arguments are made in vain, since, after all Mitch Albom is omnipotent.  If you don’t believe it, just ask him. (end of comment)

I have an earlier post on Albom which you might find entertaining.