Kicking off last April in Madison, Wis., the Sexy Liberal Comedy Tour has slowly been working its way around the country, seeking out places in need of a good, liberal night of comedy.

            Led by Stephanie Miller and her radio show cohorts, John Fugelsang and Hal Sparks, the unscripted political comedy has been selling out even in the red states (Texas, anyone?).

            “The tour has been hugely successful, especially considering it is an off election year,” Fugelsang said. “We had Aretha Franklin come to see us in Detroit, Lily Tomlin came and joined us onstage in Los Angeles, and we’ve had sold out shows coast to coast.”

            Miller, a Lockport native, brings an interesting twist. Born into your tried and true Republican family, she runs against the grain of her father, William E. Miller, Barry Goldwater’s 1964 running mate, producing a comedian who leads the show with deep knowledge of both the left and the right.

            “I don’t think there has ever been a progressive liberal comedy tour like this before,” Fugelsang said. “I don’t think there has been a liberal comedy tour based on a radio show before either, and certainty not one that’s used mostly social networking for the advertising It’s been wonderful, it’s reached young people and old people as well.”

            Grossing over $1 million without spending a dime on advertising, the Sexy Liberal Comedy Tour has harnessed the power of social media, letting the need of progressive liberalism direct where they perform. 

             Their extreme profits also allow them to help grass roots movements in the cities where they perform. Covering a range of progressive liberal charities and movements, including social initiatives, such as the Trevor Project, a LBGT teen suicide prevention program in Los Angeles, environmental projects like anti-fracking in Syracuse, and a political issues organization working to counter balance religious rights influence in Texas politics, the Sexy Liberal Comedy Tour is covering all the bases.

            “I’m not sure who its going to be benefiting in Buffalo yet, but in every city we go to we always try to play union houses, we always donate a portion of the profits to a local organization that’s trying to make someone’s life better,” Fugelsang said. “It’s been a really amazing way to meet a lot of great people, because it doesn’t really matter who you vote for for president if you’re not fighting on the local level.”

            The trio isn’t just all talk either. All are well-informed, politically minded, active supporters of several movements. Sparks works with the NOH8 campaign and One Laptop per Child while Fugelsang performs for soldiers stationed overseas and has currently spent a lot of time at Occupy Wall Street.

            “I think it’s the beginning of something really big,” Fugelsang said of the Occupy movement. “I don’t think this movement is going to look the same a year from now and I think the greatest fear of the one percent that runs this country is that conservative Americans are going to realize that Occupy Wall Street speaks to them much more than FOX news does.”

            Most college kids are familiar with the liberal brand of comedy. The Colbert Report and The Daily Show are pervasive culture icons for the college demographic and have indoctrinated millions into their political satire cult. Yet the conservative side, for some reason, seems to have a shortage of comedians working to support their message.

            “You go to a comedy club and someone can do material about the homeless or retarded people and maybe they can get away with being outrageously funny for two or three minutes and then it is feeling kind of wrong,” Fugelsang said. “If you’re doing conservative comedy, you are de facto defending the status quo that runs things…liberals are the ones trying to change things for the less fortunate and…the conservative power base is more about protecting the status quo. So the reason why FOX couldn’t do a comedy show, and they shouldn’t try, is that you can’t be funny while attacking down, it doesn’t work.”

So, if you’re up for a dose of conservative bashing, liberal wise-cracking comedy given by three diverse but well informed political satirists, you’re not going want to miss the Sexy Liberal Comedy Tour‘s Buffalo stop at Shea’s Performing Arts Center on Nov. 19.

Email: arts@ubspectrum.com

Harvard Law School Professor Alan M. Dershowitz defended on Thursday Israel’s decision to secure the return of captured soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for the release of around 1,000 Palestinian prisoners as part and parcel of Israeli democracy, something that he said Western observers do not take sufficient care to understand.
Dershowitz made the remarks at a talk alongside Rabbi Jonathan H. Sacks, the chief religious leader of British Jews, and said that Israel’s decision to agree to a swap represents a vital democracy insofar as the movement to secure Shalit’s freedom was a popular one that was led by his family and carried out in the court of public opinion.
“No matter what we may think in the halls of academia … ultimately, the decision has to be made by Israelis,” Dershowitz said.
Many observers have criticized Israel’s choice to release a large number of prisoners in exchange for Shalit’s return, a decision that many say will lead to further kidnappings of Israeli soldiers to be used as bargaining chips. Dershowitz pushed back against American criticism of Israeli policy by saying that American critics of Israel do not adequately take into consideration Israel’s status as a democracy, which he said entitles it to a greater degree of independence than some of its critics grant.
In the wake of the exchange, Dershowitz and Sacks both said it was important for Israel to retain its Jewish identity even in the hailstorm of conflict, adding that the long-standing tension between Israelis and Palestinians should, in principle, be able to lead to a sense of understanding between the two peoples.
“If there is anyone on earth who should be able to understand Jewish struggles, it’s Palestinians,” Sacks said. “And if there is anyone on earth who should be able to understand Palestinian struggles, it’s Jews.”
Dershowitz said that while the conflict is headed in the wrong direction politically, it is moving in the right direction intellectually.
“It can’t be based on ‘it’s our home’ or ‘it’s your home,’” Dershowitz said. “It’s the home of both people and both people have to live in peace with each other.”
Both Sacks and Dershowitz, two highly vocal advocates for a Jewish state, recognized the difficulty of the conflict. For all their expertise on the matter, neither Sacks nor Dershowitz had a clear view of whether the effort to achieve peace is progressing in the right direction.
Both men said that there was an inevitability to the tie between the Jewish people’s history and today’s Israel. Because Jews are unique in their perpetual homelessness, Israel remains a product of Jews’ history of trauma and expulsion, Sacks said.
“Jews discovered that there was not one inch on the face of the planet that they could call home,” Sacks said.
“It’s hard to see how, in a world in which there are 56 Islamic states and at least 82 Christian states, there isn’t room for one Jewish state,” Sacks added. “Whatever criterion you use, Jews have a right to this very small space.”

The tent protests in Tel Aviv began in muggy mid-July with a handful of young people pitching tents to protest the skyrocketing price of housing in Israel. (Tents — get it?) The first night, reporters outnumbered protesters, but a chord had been struck. The focus quickly widened to take in a gamut of shared complaints about an economy that looked great at the macro level but had created a growing gap between rich and poor. Inspired in part by the Arab Spring (“People thought, Wow, if they can do it, why can’t we do it?” says Shaffir) and in part by Madrid’s indignados movement, the Israeli protests combined and managed the contagious spread seen in Israel’s neighbors as well as the difficult economic and social issues similar to those that emerged in Spain. Ground zero in the Tel Aviv protests, fittingly enough, was Rothschild Boulevard, a shady walkway named for a fabulously wealthy family who helped found Israel as a state originally grounded in social welfare. Within two weeks, 40 camps sprang up around the country. Two weeks later, the camps numbered 100 and marchers 350,000, a whopping turnout in a country of just 7 million.
(See photos of Occupy protests from around the world.)
“The spirit of this was amazing,” says Shaffir. “That’s maybe something you can send to the people at Wall Street: happiness was the key. Journalists asked, ‘Is it really serious? Because I see a lot of people smiling.’ I said that’s what makes it serious. People have hope again.”
Another key: nonpartisanship. There was no room for labels and even less for parties in a protest that strove for a “new language” based on common ground staked out in group discussions, assemblies or councils. People shared with strangers what they were embarrassed to confess to their children: We can’t afford the expensive ice cream.
“The other thing that’s very important is chaos,” says Shaffir, who arrived for a breakfast interview after spending the night talking on Rothschild Boulevard, where a handful of tents had gone up anew, weeks after police dismantled the last vestiges of the main camp. “As a movement that goes up against the most powerful force, if you act like an organization, like an institution, you lose. If you have one head, they know what to cut off. You have to be like water, to be everywhere, to be unpredictable. We work like an open code. Everybody should act their part. Everybody should act like a leader.”
(Read about the New York City protesters holding ground in Zuccotti Park.)
At one end of Rothschild, a headquarters of sorts went up, though it amounted to a few workstations under fabric stretched to reduce the glare on the computers that lay underneath. “I think in a way what we see in the streets today is a result of things we were trained for from using the Internet since age 5,” says Levi. “I think these assemblies are chat rooms, wide open, with this sense of nonhierarchy, that everyone is equal in the kingdom of the Internet, where there are no kings or queens. We’ve taken these tools that we’ve acquired unknowingly — this generation of ours which was blamed for not doing anything in the world — and now we’ve taken these things we’ve learned out into the street. And it’s pretty impressive, I must say.”
In Israel, the leap to the masses was both more challenging and, in other ways, a bit easier than elsewhere. Jewish Israeli society is relatively small and cohesive, united in a sense of nationhood and shared risk; almost everyone, for instance, serves in the army. But it is also riven by differences, between secular and religious, between Jews and the 20% of the population who are Arab, between recent immigrant and native-born. Only the black-clad ultra-orthodox religious, who gather in residential enclaves, started the summer with a community, Shaffir notes. “If you’re secular, your community is your family. That’s all.”
“If we talk about tips, the most important thing is to connect the different groups, the different social classes,” she says. “And that’s the hardest thing.”
Yet it happened. In just weeks, the protests that some conservative politicians reflexively dismissed as elitist or leftist swelled into a national movement, drawing Israelis from every class and cohort, all of them beaming as they found one another on the street together. In the tent cities, campers organized kitchens, kindergartens, trash removal. They even elected representatives to reclaim a political realm that had grown alien and remote, the province of professional politicians. “And people were so happy,” Shaffir says. “Israelis, for so many years, didn’t feel like we could do anything.”
(Read about rioters hijacking Rome’s Occupy protest.)
In time, the political establishment scrambled to respond, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu naming a committee to list specific actions — more money for child care, less for defense — that many in the group call a misapprehension of what was, at bottom, something more diffuse: a remaking of the national consciousness. “The fact that we have no specific list of demands is very hard for them,” says Levi, referring to the Knesset, the Israeli legislature. “I’m not sure we’ve directly affected the political system yet, but I’m sure we will. Because the people who elect these robots spent many hours in the tent cities. It was a learning experience.”
The lessons continue. The other day, organizers set out to secure Tel Aviv’s main public gathering place, Rabin Square, for a follow-up demonstration. They learned it would cost them about $5,000. “That’s a disgrace,” says Shaffir. “It’s like your right of protest is also privatized.”
So they decided they didn’t need the permission of the very people they were opposing. “We just told everybody we’re going to reoccupy Rothschild,” she says. “It made everybody happy, because we were getting back to the streets.”
— With reporting by Aaron J. Klein / Tel Aviv
See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.
See the Cartoons of the Week.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2097627,00.html#ixzz1bqBRjxMG

U.S. Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations Ambassador Rosemary DiCarlo delivered remarks to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) during its monthly Middle East session. DiCarlo outlined President Barack Obama’s Middle East policies, specifically and emphatically urging the other UNSC member states to reject any Palestinian effort to unilaterally declare a state.
DiCarlo reiterated the Obama Administration’s firm opposition to any Palestinian attempt to unilaterally seek statehood:
“Let there be no doubt: symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the United Nations in September will not create an independent Palestinian state. The United States will not support unilateral campaigns at the United Nations in September or any other time.
A viable and sustainable peace agreement can only be achieved by mutual agreement of the parties themselves. Only through serious and responsible negotiations can the parties achieve the shared goal of two states for two peoples, with a secure, Jewish state of Israel living side by side in peace and security with an independent, contiguous, and viable state of Palestine.
This is the goal. This is the vision. But there are no short-cuts. We call again on all member states to encourage the parties to take the constructive actions to promote peace-and to avoid actions that could undermine trust, prejudge negotiations, or place the temptations of symbolism over the hard work of reaching agreement.”
DiCarlo also condemned Hamas’ “path of terror and rejection” and urged for captured soldier Gilad Shalit to be freed:
“As President Obama has made clear, Palestinian leaders will not achieve peace or prosperity for their people if Hamas insists on a path of terror and rejection. Palestinian leaders must also take further steps to combat incitement to violence. And Hamas must immediately and unconditionally release Gilad Shalit, who has now suffered in captivity for more than five years.”

Yitzhak Benhorin

WASHINGTON – US President Barack Obama spoke Monday at a fundraiser for potential Jewish donors to his 2012 presidential campaign and assured then that Jerusalem and Washington’s relations were unshakable.

“One inviolable principle will be that the United States and Israel will always be stalwart allies and friends, that that bond isn’t breakable and that Israel’s security will always be at the top tier of considerations in terms of how America manages its foreign policy – because it’s the right thing to do, because Israel is our closest ally and friend, it is a robust democracy, it shares our values and it shares our principles,” Obama said to roaring applause.

referring to regional changes sweeping the Middle East, Obama stressed that, “Both the United States and Israel are going to have to look at this new landscape with fresh eyes. It’s not going to be sufficient for us just to keep on doing the same things we’ve been doing and expect somehow that things are going to work themselves out.

“We’re going to have to be creative and we’re going to have to be engaged. We’re going to have to look for opportunities where the best impulses in the Middle East come to the fore and the worst impulses are weakened”

• 
• Obama at AIPAC (Photo: AP)
• Such achievements, he continued, would have to be carved from a position of strength: “This is why my administration has done more to promote Israel’s security, its qualitative military edge, its defense capabilities than any administration over the last 25 years.And we have made that commitment consistently.  ”But it also means that we’ve got to engage diplomatically… there are going to be moments over the course of the next six months or the next 12 months or the next 24 months in which there may be tactical disagreements in terms of how we approach these difficult problems. ”But the broader vision, is one in which Israel is a secure Jewish state,” Obama stressed. “One where it is able to live in peace with its neighbors, where kids can get on the bus or go to bed at night and not have to worry about missiles landing on them, where commerce and interactions between peoples in the region is occurring in a normal fashion, where the hopes and dreams of the original travelers to Israel, the original settlers in Israel, that those hopes and dreams that date back a millennium, that those hopes are realized. That will remain our North Star. That will remain our goal.”Obama told the crowd that he was “absolutely confident” the goal could be achieved, reiterating that it was “going to require some hard work.”

  “It going to require that not only this administration employs all of its creative powers to try to bring about peace in the region, but it’s also going to require all of you as engaged citizens of the United States who are friends of Israel making sure that you are giving us suggestions, you are in an honest dialogue with us, that you’re helping to shape how both Americans and Israelis think about the opportunities and challenges.”

  “My hope,” he concluded, “Is that through the kind of conversations that we’re having here tonight, that we’re going to be able to, together, craft the kind of strategy that not only leads to a strong America, but also leads to a strong Israel.”

  http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4084958,00.html

The national humiliation of Rep. Anthony Weiner represents something new in the politics of sex scandals. Ordinarily, these scandals come with a pretext, however thin, of public interest. The issue, we’re usually told, isn’t just sex—it’s a cover-up, or hypocrisy, or harassment, or financial malfeasance. But in Weiner’s case, the excuses for the salacious national pile-on are exceptionally thin. They mostly come down to the fact that, when confronted with an embarrassing secret vice, Weiner panicked and lied. There’s also shock at his extreme recklessness in risking such a scandal, though if that’s what the scandal is about, it’s weirdly recursive. In the end, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Weiner is being publicly annihilated for private, consensual communications that have hurt no one but himself and presumably his wife.

It’s understandable why his actions leave people disgusted. It would be less skeevy if he met his cybersex partners in cybersex forums, instead of enlisting his political admirers into masturbatory exchanges. The brazenness of his exhibitionism is unsettling; it appears at once narcissistic and, as Laura Kipnis has written, masochistic. He’s embarrassed his pregnant wife and his Democratic colleagues. Worst of all, from a strictly partisan point of view, he’s revived the credibility of the odious Andrew Breitbart.

But the core of his transgression was a small and mundane thing—engaging in sexual fantasies on the Internet. The fact that this has led to a salacious national excoriation has disturbing implications not just for Weiner, but for us all.

Understanding Weinergate
How social media felled a rising star, and how his Jewishness was involved
I say this with one caveat. It seems likely that Weiner tweeted the photo of his erection to a Seattle college student by accident, intending to send it to the porn star who was alphabetically just beneath her in his contacts queue. (By now, it seems beside the point to express dismay at having to write sentences like the previous one.) If it was something more than that—if he intended to send an unbidden picture of his penis to a young woman whose only interest in him was political—that is an inexcusable act of harassment.

Some feminists have argued that, consensual or not, the content of his exchanges reveals a man with a twisted attitude toward women. On the Daily Beast, Kirsten Powers, an ex-girlfriend and onetime close friend of Weiner’s, described being deeply disturbed by what he wrote to Las Vegas blackjack dealer Lisa Weiss. “Radar Online posted the transcript, and it is rife with misogyny and distorted views about women,” she writes. “In referring to oral sex, Wiener tells her, ‘You will gag on me before you c** with me in you’ and ‘[I’m] thinking about gagging your hot mouth with my c***.’ This is not about sex. It’s about dominating and inflicting physical pain on a woman, a fantasy the hardcore porn industry makes billions of dollars on selling to men.” These comments helped convince Powers, once a Weiner supporter, that he should resign.

Here’s my problem with this. It’s one thing to argue that Weiner should step down for being stupid enough to bring this kind of attention on himself, his family, and his party. It’s another thing to subject someone’s sexual fantasies to a political litmus test. Weiner is hardly outré in the way he eroticizes power. There’s no evidence, in the Powers piece, that Weiner actually treats women badly—indeed, she describes him as a loyal and thoughtful friend. There is something totalitarian about examining people’s erotic lives for ideological deviance.

That’s why human beings—even exhibitionists—need privacy. Until very recently, there was a tacit understanding that politicians, like the rest of us, had secret sides that needed to be accommodated. Few people think that FDR or JFK’s dishonesty about their sex lives somehow poisoned their ability to conduct the nation’s business. In recent years, though, two great forces conspired to do away with the ability of public figures to keep sexual impropriety discreet—feminism and technology.

It is a good thing, of course, that feminism banished the clubby understandings that enabled not just philandering but widespread sexual harassment and even rape. The drama around Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a stark reminder of the dark side of a radically laissez-faire attitude toward powerful people’s sexual appetites. During the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, liberals like myself looked longingly at France’s seemingly blasé sophistication, its urbane disinterest in its leaders’ sexual peccadilloes. Now we’ve learned that that disinterest extended to cases of coercion and assault.

It turns out that Strauss-Kahn’s penchant for pressuring women into sex was a sort of open secret, but few reported on it for fear of transgressing French norms of privacy. In the wake of his arrest in New York for allegedly trying to rape an immigrant maid, many French politicians and intellectuals have offered a dispiriting refresher course on the misogyny underlying the country’s culture of sexual entitlement. Journalist Jean-François Kahn dismissed the whole affair as a “troussage de domestique”—sometimes translated as lifting the skirt of a servant—as if Strauss-Kahn was simply a high-spirited aristocratic scamp. (Kahn later issued regrets for having made the statement.)

The television series Mad Men, set in the early 1960s, captures the American version of this mentality, which prevailed until feminism challenged it. That’s why the Clarence Thomas hearings were such a watershed—women are, thankfully, no longer expected to endure overtures and sexual taunts from our superiors. This is a prerequisite for equality.

Technology has further eroded people’s ability to have one self in public and another in private. Think of Jon Favreau, the Obama speechwriter forced to apologize for groping a cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton at a drunken party. Given this, it was madness for Weiner to think his online life could remain secret. But this requirement that even moderately public people behave in publicly acceptable ways all the time? That’s madness, too.

Lately, we’ve seen a number of people undone for slips in the half-public world of social media. Last year, the conservative Daily Caller obtained the archives of a private listserv for left-of-center reporters and writers called JournoList, gleefully combing them for damaging tidbits. The Washington Post’s David Weigel lost his job for some of his comments, including one that suggested that Matt Drudge should set himself on fire—a bit of obviously jokey hyperbole that no one would have noticed had Weigel said it at a bar. In February, the ultra-intrepid war reporter Nir Rosen had to resign from his position at NYU’s Center for Law and Security because of an offensive and quickly regretted Twitter crack about journalist Lara Logan’s sexual assault in Egypt.

Now, people say offensive things about their colleagues and competitors all the time in ordinary life, and no one blinks. For both Weigel and Rosen, the sin wasn’t the words themselves, but the carelessness of letting them leak into the public sphere. The same is true of Weiner, even if his misdeeds are more serious. Very few of us could survive having our offhand comments or secret thoughts subjected to the public scrutiny of political enemies.

It could be that the ability to guard one’s public image, despite the Internet’s intrusions and temptations, is a requisite of modern political life. In that case, Weiner will have to go. But his crime wasn’t engaging in legal and not even particularly kinky cybersex. It was getting caught.

Given the virtual panopticon we now live in, Weiner won’t be the last person to be subjected to this kind of merciless exposure and ridicule. That’s why at some point, unless we want to endure a constant cycle of scandal and personal destruction, we should really figure out some way of forgiving people for being grossly human in public.

http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics

The photo  went public and Weiner denied the truth of the story for several days.

When it appeared  that he couldn’t plausibly deny the story any longer, he gave a press conference (today) in which he admitted the facts of the story, asked for forgiveness, and vowed to stay on in congress.

Many people already hate Mr. Weiner.

He has been straightforward and aggressive in his defense of the workers and the poor.

I like the guy a lot.

He’s a good man who made some bad judgments.

I hope he gets this behind him and continues to serve the American people.

And Israel. A true liberal that loves and vehemently fights for Isael. Read this from Salon :