The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The Rock and the Hard Spot The definition of the impossible puzzle RADIO FAR SIDE Genesis 32:27  The man asked him, “What is your name?” “Jacob,” he answered. 28  Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel,   because you have wrestled with YHWH and with humans and have overcome.” 29  Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.” But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there. 30  So Jacob called the place Peniel,   saying, “It is because I have met YHWH face to face, and yet my life was spared.” There are some 14th century BC documents called the  Amarna Letters  that refer to a region known as Canaan, along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Among the many groups of people who lived there were the Philistines, in a city-state called Philistia, from which we get the name Palestine. The Letters reference a group of people called  Habiru , which some claim is a varia...

  Israel's 9/11 CJ HOPKINS Sorry, but I’ve seen this movie before. I saw it in New York in 2001. On the afternoon of September 11, I stood among the crowd on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and watched what was left of the Twin Towers burn. Walking home as the sun was setting, it appeared to be snowing. It wasn’t snowing. The snowflakes were bits and pieces of paper, burnt ginger orange and rust brown around the edges, which the wind had carried across the East River, contracts, memos, actuarial tables, pages torn out of trashy paperback books, scribbled notes, pink telephone messages, the children’s drawings and affirmations that adorn the colorless upholstered walls of corporate cubicles throughout America. It was snowing relics, the hideous detritus of thousands of people’s mundane lives. America had been attacked. It was time to come together as Americans, to put aside our political differences, to rally around the flag, and the president, and go and kill a whole lot of people w...