March 10, 2010 | 10:18 pm

Cartman knows that gingers have souls

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Seven days until the return of “South Park.” And like this kid, Cartman wants you to know that gingers do have souls.

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March 10, 2010 | 5:55 pm

More trouble for Sen. Ensign

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Months ago Sen. John Ensign gave the C Street house a real black eye. Now previously undisclosed e-mails reveal an odious intersection of adultery and political repayment:

The messages are the first written records from Mr. Ensign documenting his efforts to find clients for Mr. Hampton, a top aide and close friend, after the senator had an affair with his wife, Cynthia Hampton. They appear to undercut the senator’s assertion that he did not know the work might involve Congressional lobbying, which could violate a federal ban on such activities by staff members for a year after leaving government.

The e-mail messages also hint at what Mr. Ensign’s office now says was an effort by the Las Vegas firm, a small energy investment business called P2SA Equity, to improperly link Mr. Ensign’s possible assistance to a promised donation.

The F.B.I. and the Senate Ethics Committee are investigating whether Mr. Ensign, in trying to contain the fallout from his affair with Ms. Hampton, conspired to find lobbying work for her husband despite the federal restrictions. They are also examining a $96,000 payment Mr. Ensign’s parents made to the Hamptons.

Mr. Hampton has said that the senator promised to work around the lobbying ban and help him make up the income that he and his wife, a former Ensign campaign staff member, lost when they left their jobs after the affair ended in 2008.

What would The Family say now?

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March 10, 2010 | 7:17 am

Cheeseburger Pringles not kosher

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

flickr

Pringles has recalled its cheeseburger flavored chips. No, not because that sounds disgusting. Instead, there is concern these chips were contaminated with salmonella.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

If you were about to pop the top on a can of taco- or cheeseburger-flavored Pringles, you might want to hold that thought

The meat-inspired chips are the latest products added to a recall stretching back to Feb. 26. Pringles’s parent company Proctor & Gamble announced the voluntary recall Tuesday.

The chips contain hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP), a common “flavor-enhancer,” made by Basic Food Flavors, Inc., that has been found to be contaminated with salmonella.

Products from 26 other brands have already been recalled (See here for complete list of products affected). That list could continue to grow, as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is still investigating.

That doesn’t sound kosher, even if we set aside the mixing of dairy and meat. A sign from God to keep kosher? If so, look out Doritos.

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March 10, 2010 | 5:37 am

Muslims massacre Christian in Nigeria

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Living in the comfort of the United States, I scoff when people try to tell me how hard it is being a Christian in our society. It’s not hard. It is if you’re Cassie Bernall, but stories like hers are so rare that such tragedy serves as our only reference for someone standing up for God at the most difficult time at home.

In Iraq, in the West Bank—that’s where it’s difficult to be a Christian. In an American mall when shops are wishing you a happy holiday instead of a merry Christmas—that’s not.

You can also add Nigeria to the list of places that, as a Christian, you’d prefer to not live in. There, over the weekend, Christian villagers were rounded up in nets and then hacked to death by a bunch of pissed off Muslims. From the LAT:

Reports on the death toll differed wildly, with some placing it at about 200 and others reporting 528 killed and thousands injured. Casualty figures in the recurrent Muslim-Christian violence in Nigeria’s volatile Plateau state are often difficult to ascertain, as each side inflates its losses.

However, attacks in January and on Sunday have left at least 500 dead, making it the worst violence here for some years.

Hundreds of nomadic Fulani herdsmen launched coordinated attacks on three Christian villages—Dogo Nahawa, Ratsat and Zot, just south of Jos—about 3 a.m. Sunday.

The killers planted nets and animal traps outside the huts of the villagers, mainly peasant farmers, fired weapons in the air, then attacked with machetes, according to human rights lawyer Shehu Sani of the nongovernment Civil Rights Congress, who visited the villages and interviewed dozens of survivors.

“People came out of their houses and started falling into the animal traps and mosquito nets and then they were hacked down,” he said. “They were the kind of traps used for wild animals.”

Read the rest here. It’s not clear the origin of this interfaith fighting, but it appears the recent massacre stems from allegations that the Christian villagers attacked the Muslim herdsmen’s camp last month, killing four and stealing 1,200 cattle.

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March 9, 2010 | 11:29 pm

Evangelicals and the sins of Sodom

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

This one has been on the must-mention list. Sorry for the delay. It’s Nicholas D. Kristof’s column from two weeks ago, and it concerns changes in the social political agenda of conservative Christians.

A growing number of conservative Christians are explicitly and self-critically acknowledging that to be “pro-life” must mean more than opposing abortion. The head of World Vision in the United States, Richard Stearns, begins his fascinating book, “The Hole in Our Gospel,” with an account of a visit a decade ago to Uganda, where he met a 13-year-old AIDS orphan who was raising his younger brothers by himself.

“What sickened me most was this question: where was the Church?” he writes. “Where were the followers of Jesus Christ in the midst of perhaps the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time? Surely the Church should have been caring for these ‘orphans and widows in their distress.’ (James 1:27). Shouldn’t the pulpits across America have flamed with exhortations to rush to the front lines of compassion?

“How have we missed it so tragically, when even rock stars and Hollywood actors seem to understand?”

Mr. Stearns argues that evangelicals were often so focused on sexual morality and a personal relationship with God that they ignored the needy. He writes laceratingly about “a Church that had the wealth to build great sanctuaries but lacked the will to build schools, hospitals, and clinics.”

In one striking passage, Mr. Stearns quotes the prophet Ezekiel as saying that the great sin of the people of Sodom wasn’t so much that they were promiscuous or gay as that they were “arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” (Ezekiel 16:49.)

Hmm. Imagine if sodomy laws could be used to punish the stingy, unconcerned rich!

Read the rest here. Giving a critical analysis of the reportage here would be something I reserve for GetReligion. But I can simply say that Kristof definitely seems to get religion—and where he might not he takes the time to figure it out.

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March 9, 2010 | 8:57 pm

If Ben Folds played Christian music

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Christian rockstars are real. In the music industry, artists who start out in CCM are generally talked about as “crossing over” to a mainstream market—a la Amy Grant, MercyMe and Switchfoot. But what if the brilliant and profane Ben Folds went the opposite direction like Boby Dylan and Johnny Cash did?

Cathleen Falsani says his music might look like this. It’s the Michael Gungor Band, and it makes me want to rock out.

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March 8, 2010 | 11:27 pm

Missing Mr. Bush?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Short answer: No. Long answer: Nooooooooo.

President Bush has been out of office little more than a year, and it looks like some people are already longing for brighter days. Stanley Fish is saying “I told you so.”

Well it’s a bit more than a year now and signs of Bush’s rehabilitation are beginning to pop up. One is literally a sign, a billboard that appeared recently on I-35 in Minnesota.

(skip)

And now, right on schedule, Bush has resurfaced (just as I imagined him doing a year ago last September ) to join Bill Clinton in a humanitarian relief effort. He is officially a member in good standing of the ex-presidents club, and the longer he lives the more his reputation will be burnished. To be sure, his post-presidency resume is still thin, but we can expect it to be beefed up by good deeds, ceremonial appearances and the activities that will surround the building and opening of his library at Southern Methodist University. We’ll see Bush the tour guide and Bush the patron of historical scholarship and, perhaps, even Bush the seminar leader.

And the judgment of history? Well, I’m not that foolish, but I will venture to say that it will be more nuanced than anything the professional Bush-haters — indistinguishable in temperament from the professional Obama-haters — are now able to imagine. He will not go to the top of the list, but neither will he be the figure of fun and derision he seemed destined to be only a year ago.

Read the rest here.

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March 8, 2010 | 9:06 pm

Do the Navi speak Hebrew?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I missed the Oscars last night because I was rounding out my Sunday of studying in the library. But listening to a discussion of the awards show on NPR this morning, I was pretty sure I heard a blue, big-eared version of Ben Stiller sprinkle some Hebrew into the Na’vi language. Bloggish confirms it. Check a bluish, Jewish Stiller in the above video.

“That means, this seemed like a better idea in rehearsal.”

I wonder if Ron Artest thought the same thing after the Lakers dropped their third straight yesterday.

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March 7, 2010 | 1:58 pm

Lakers’ Artest’s Hebrew defense

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Jordan Farmar is still the Lakers’ only Jew. But check out Ron Artest’s hair for today’s game against the Orlando Magic.

There are Hindi and Japanese characters on the back, but that’s definitely Hebrew in the front. In three different languages, Dennis Rodman’s Artest’s dyed hair says “Defense.”

Do we have a new Hebrew Hammer?

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March 7, 2010 | 9:29 am

Jewish leaders meet with University of California president

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

University administrators don’t envy Mark Yudof these days. The UC president has been under heavy fire for tuition hikes and faculty pay-cuts stemming for California’s fiscal insolvency; he’s had to written letter to the entire university system promoting diversity after that “Compton Cookout”; and he’s still dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—at UC Irvine.

Last week, a day before massive protests at Berkeley and UCLA, Orange County Jewish leaders brought their concerns about the climate at UCI to Yudof’s Oakland office. According to a press release from the group—Shalom Elcott, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation Orange County; Gerald Solomon of the Samueli Foundation; and Jeff Margolis and Dr. Jim Weiss of the Jewish Federation’s Rose Project—Yudof told them he was unhappy with the way students involved with the Muslim Student Union repeatedly disrupted a recent speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren and that:

These students should be prosecuted for violating the student code of conduct and breaking the law.

He agreed that, pending an investigation with full due process, the Muslim Student Union (MSU) should be disciplined for their violations of campus codes of conduct.

As for the future of the University of California and my tuition of $40,000 next year ...

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March 5, 2010 | 9:34 am

Godless racism

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

There is a lot of complete craziness in our country’s legal history. I found one such gem while reading for my constitutional law course this morning. In Loving v. Virginia, in which the US Supreme Court invalidated a state law criminalizing interracial marriages between whites and non-whites because it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the reversed a trial judge who had this to say in convicting the couple of miscegenation:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

Thank God those days of ignorance are gone, though religion is far too often still used to further ungodly ends.

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