RUTHFULLY YOURS

I AM A JEWISH LATIN AMERICAN WOMAN…..BUT ….THIS IS NOT QUITE UP MY ALLEY….AS MY E-PAL M.P. ASKS “WHAT EXACTLY ARE “INCLUSIVE PUBLIC SPHERES…..MAYBE URINAL FOR WOMEN????”

The Sword, the Pen, and the Uterus: The Role of Jewish Latin American Women in Creating Inclusive Public Spheres

Wednesday, December 5, 2012
3:30PM
Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall, HBI
Epstein Building, Brandeis University,
515 South St., Waltham, MA 02454 (Directions/Map)

From 1976 until 1983, Argentina lived under a repressive military dictatorship. Join current HBI Scholar-in-Residence Dalia Wassner to learn about the creative activism of Jewish women in Argentina as they fought to bring transparency and accountability to the period of terror through film and writing. Members of the public are welcome to join Fernando Rosenberg’s class, “Culture and Social Change in Latin America” for this lecture. Learn more about the event.

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2309/America-2012-Running-Scared.aspx

If Election Day is about picking winners, the morning after is for post-mortems. That’s when we slice open the losing campaigns, set aside the hundreds of millions of dollars that gush out and pick apart the cause of death.

Why did the Romney campaign fail? Maybe the country is now GOP-proof. That is, maybe a Constitution-guided, free-market, limited-government candidate no longer can “appeal” to the majority of the electorate. It could be that the death knell rang early this year once 67.3 million of us, or one in five Americans, had come to depend on federal assistance, formerly known as “the dole.”

This nearly takes us back to the level we hit in 1994 (23.1 percent), before President Bill Clinton and the GOP-led Congress “ended” welfare as we knew it. After a noticeable decline, the percentage skyrocketed during President Obama’s first term. So, too, did the percentage of Americans who pay zero federal taxes, now a shocking 49.5 percent. Right off the bat, half the country listens to Mitt Romney promise to relieve taxpayers of the onerous burdens imposed by the federal government and either fears for its livelihood or hears static.

It was exactly such an economic message that formed not just the core of Romney’s campaign, but all of it. On one level, this exclusive focus on economic issues to the point of tunnel vision marked a campaign determined to play it safe. On another level, it was a huge gamble, a roll of the dice on which Romney staked everything.

Why? I think this risky strategy evolved from the defensive crouch the average center-right politician assumes even to enter the intensely hostile environment our mass media have made of the public square. Seeking to avoid media retaliation, Romney advanced a cramped line of attack. For example, we have in Barack Obama a president more demonstrably socialist than any since FDR, but if Mitt Romney were to have mentioned that or called Obama a socialist – with fact-based backup from, say, Stanley Kurtz’s scholarly book “Radical-in-Chief” – the media catcalls would have begun.

http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=5109

“The game is still on. Conservatives have the persuasive case to make, but invective, insult, rant and rave won’t do it. Reasoned argument will. This goes for Democrats, too. They should remember the infallible Pruden Principle: Nothing recedes like success. History proves it.”

Woe is us. But next time, the woe will be for the other guys. Keeping that in mind is the secret of surviving the morning after.

Losing an election always hurts; winning hurts the other guys, which is why winning is so sweet. This one hurts conservatives a lot, and it’s particularly painful for those with unrealistic great expectations.

Pessimists abound. Rep. Ron Paul, who holds the North American franchise for pessimism, says we no longer have to worry about the “fiscal cliff” because we’re already lie in the rocks and weeds at the bottom of Gruesome Gulch. Rep. John Boehner, the speaker of the House, who promised defiantly on election eve to hang tough on the Republican mantra of “no new taxes” even if the president were to be re-elected, now sounds not so sure.

Some of the more prominent conservative pundits are on their way to New York City in search of a building high enough to jump out of. Rush Limbaugh went to bed on Election Night “thinking we had lost the country, I don’t know how else you look at this.” Sean Hannity told his Fox News audience that he wouldn’t succumb to depression but it looks like to him like America is “no longer the center-right country that it once was” and “has been conditioned to be an entitlement society.” If that’s not depression it’s a reasonable facsimile of it. When Ann Coulter, the prolific author and pundit who writes exclusively in purple ink, told talk-show hostess Laura Ingraham that the nation is now interested only in handouts, “There is no hope.”

Miss Ingraham told her: “Pep up, move forward, girl.” Good advice. It’s easy for anyone to be misled by the media, whose patron saint is Chicken Little. The media covers politics the way television “journalists” cover the weather: all panic all the time. They can’t help it, it’s all they know. The coverage often reminds me of my devout grandmother, beyond elderly when she called me in tears one day many years ago to tell me that “God is dead, they just announced it on the television.”

Another Tack: Shelly’s macho-man mentor Hanna Rovina, the late-great first lady of the Israeli theater, once quipped: “people with connections don’t need protectzia” (“favoritism,” in Israeli parlance). This is perhaps why in days bygone retiring IDF generals invariably gravitated to the Labor Party, where they had ample connections which guaranteed them a helpful leg-up to the […]