Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

A Kahanist allegedly named Neil Pomper was the first person to notify me that Masada2000 had a S.H.I.T. listing for me. This led, in turn to my notifyng the site’s host about its content. This in turn led to the site being taken down. After this, I wrote to Neil (if that’s his real name) suggesting that if he’d kept his big mouth shut, his site might still be beaming its hate all over the world.

Apparently, Neil hasn’t been able to get Masada2000 up again. But he’s resorted to the next best thing. Any slime bucket can create a blog at Blogger.com. So he’s impersonated me, and mimicked my name and created this defamatory blog which also infringes on copyrights of two images I own.

I am disappointed that Neil isn’t brave enough to turn on the blog’s comment features so I can send all of my readers there to tell him what a shit he is. It is also possible that “Neil Pomper” is either Rachel Neuwirth or a “good friend” of hers since I’ve tussled with her as well here making her none too happy.

At any rate, a claim of defamation and copyright infringement has been submitted to Blogger’s legal department and a DMCA notice will follow shortly. The site will be down in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Hopefully, Blogger will monitor Neil’s fecal droppings better the next time he tries this sort of shenanigan. Some people have entirely too much time on their hands and manage to get themselves into tons of mischief.

If anyone’s an attorney or forensic computer sleuth and would like to help me pursue this individual, please contact me through this blog. And anyone who can use this internet header to help me get closer to identifying this jackass would be much appreciated:

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From: Neil Pomper Subject: Hey, Creepy Dickie, do check the link enclosed, You Shmuck!
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tags blogger.com-blog-abuse, masada2000, neil-pomper

Those of you who’ve followed this blog over the past two years may remember my crusade against the Jewish and Israeli Blog Awards (see the many posts I wrote) which were at the time run by Aussie Dave and sponsored by the Jerusalem Post. Among the criticisms I had were that Aussie Dave was running the competition as a committee of one which might allow personal whim or political prejudice to enter into his decision making. I also noted that Jerusalem Post’s sponsorship skewed the competition toward a heavily partisan political agenda represented by that Likud-oriented publication.

A new effort is underway in which a committee is running JIBA through a new blog called JBlogosphere (not to be confused with the Jewish blog aggregator Jblogosphere.com). The blog for JIBA says there are four sponsors but I haven’t seen who they are. There are also a few other heartening changes that indicate they may have taken some of my criticism to heart.

Two years ago all the categories and nominees were heavily skewed to the political right. As a result, Little Green Footballs and similarly oriented blogs won many of the categories. This year, there will be left, right and center blog categories which actually gives one of us an opportunity to compete on a somewhat level playing field. There were few progressive blogs nominated and only one or two won any awards in JIBA last time. So I was heartened by this posting at Jblogosphere:

“Perhaps we could bring in more left-wing bloggers on the “team” to make the teamwork a bit more diverse. After all, if we want to highlight Jblogs, promoting unity among Jblogs should be one of our absolute priorities.”

But will they promote unity by including progressive Jewish bloggers not only in competition but within the organizing committee?

Having “pro-Israel advocacy” categories as the organizers are proposing isn’t the best way of making us feel more included unless they can in good conscience include progressive Jewish blogs like mine within that rubric. I consider myself “pro-Israel” but I’m as much an advocate for Israeli-Palestinian peace as I’m an advocate for one side or the other in this conflict.

And in case the JIBA organizers are sincerely interested in being truly inclusive they should take a look at the Jewish/Israeli peace blogs featured at Israel-Palestine Blogs. All of those blogs should be encouraged to participate & included in the nomination process.

In short, I believe JIBA should do its best to be non-ideological in running this competition, voting, nomination & creating competition categories. They may not even realize it but JIBA was highly ideological & I worry that the upcoming competition will reproduce the worst offenses of that process.

This snarky comment leads me to question just how sincere the organizers may be about being truly inclusive of diverse political views:

“We’ve discussed the tension between being open to feedback and criticism from bloggers and the flame wars, which have erupted in the past because of a few individuals, who, um, offered less than constructive criticism. Well, trolls are just a part of life.”

Just like Robert Duvall’s character in Apocalypse Now who said: “Oh I do love the smell of napalm in the morning;” I do so love it when pro-Israel bloggers get so defensive that they have to accuse some of their fellow Jewish bloggers of being “trolls.” Since Aussie Dave and I engaged in some hot & heavy disagreements 2 years ago about his pseudo representative version of JIBA, I can only assume this passage refers to me.

They can flame me again if they choose to ignore my legitimate arguments. But this time I think they’ll be a few more of the progressive Jewish blogs watching what they’re doing and letting the rest of the blogosphere know if something’s not kosher in the land of blogs.

UPDATE: I received a personal e-mail from Chaim Rubin, who’s helping organize JIBA this year. Clearly, Chaim and I do not see eye to eye politically. But I was impressed that his reply lacked all the defensiveness and truculence of Aussie Dave’s replies to me during my contretemps with him 2 years ago. I know I’m probably going to disagree with some or perhaps even much of what happens at JIBA this year. But I’m convinced that in Chaim there is a person of good faith helping run the show. He’s offered to add me to the committee, which I didn’t think was a good idea since many of the substantive decisions have already been made regarding the competition. But I did think such an offer was a very good sign of openness to diverse points of view.

tags aussie-dave, isreallycool, jewish-and-israeli-blog-awards, jewish-blogs, JIBA, pro-israel-advocacy

In order to maximize exposure of this blog in the Jewish blogosphere, I’ve registered with a number of Jewish blog aggregators including Jblogosphere.com, JewishBlogging and Jrants. Each of them has been gracious enough to include my feed in their directory of Jewish blogs. I don’t get a huge amount of traffic from them but I get enough to find them a useful tool to disseminate my work and I appreciate the service they provide.

I also registered at a fourth aggregator, JBlogCentral, which is sponsored by IsraelForum. Oddly enough, I noted that after submitting my blog and seeing my posts display there they stopped appearing. So I submitted again and they resumed displaying on the site. And then they stopped again. When I searched the site for my posts using Google I could find them using Cache, but I got an error using the regular Google site link saying the page was no longer available.

When you’ve dealt with Jewish right-wingers as long as I have you can smell a rat a mile off and I sure smelled one. I did some research and discovered that IsraelForum is one of those right-wing pro-Israel sites. It tried to host a Jewish blogging award this year and got into such controversy with the original founder of the award that he withdrew approval for them to use the original name of the competition.

So I had a pretty good suspicion that I’d been blackballed for not being sufficiently “pro-Israel” enough for inclusion in the blog directory (the site does note in several places that it is “pro-Israel” by which they really mean they support a hard-right political agenda). Just for the hell of it, I thought I’d check the site rules to see which one I’d “violated.” Here’s all they say on the matter:

How do we decide which blogs to include in our service?
We have no particular policy, other than trying to avoid blogs that promote hate, illegal activities, adult content, etc. But we cannot guarantee that we will be 100% successful at our attempts to avoid such content. We rely on our readers to report content that is clearly inappropriate.

So either I “promote hate, illegal activities or adult content.” We can safely ditch the last item. I think we can safely ditch the second one as well. But “promoting hate”…not that’s an interesting one. Does a progressive Zionist blogger “promote hate” of Israel? Hmmm. Hard to wrap my mind around that one. And just what is it about my blog that merits exclusion from a site which purports in its name “JBlog Central” to be a central repository of Jewish blogging. Maybe they should change their name to “JBlog Not-So-Central?”

So what does that tell you about the ideological orientation of JBlogCentral and Israel Forum? I’ve written to the site each time I discovered my exclusion including most recently yesterday. Never got a response the first time. Let’s see what they have to say if anything this time.

And just in case they rewrite their rules to reflect my criticism, we’ll keep a copy of the cached page so we can remind them of the arbitrariness of their own rules.

tags jblog-central, jewish-blogging, jrants, pro-israel, progressive-zionist

Brit Tzedek hosted a conference call with Rashid Khalidi today that was most interesting. I was most impressed with how acute his thinking is on the conflict. This is the kind of person who could’ve been a prominent international lawyer or even foreign policy wonk if he’d chosen to be. Not the type of person who suffers fools gladly.

Khalidi revealed something that may be common knowledge to some familiar with U.S. Mideast policy but it was news to me. He claims that after Hamas came to power Eliot Abrams advocated a “hard coup” against the Hamas-led PA to be led by Mohammed Dahlan. Bringing Fatah back to power forcibly was to be the essence of U.S. policy toward the Palestinians, Khalidi derisively claimed.

Khalidi, in explaining why no Arab-American was invited to speak before a recent House committee discussing the Israeli Arab conflict, gave an interesting colloquy on Arab American political power. He likens the community to the Jewish community in the 1930s. He said that while there were many American Jews in 1930s America and that their leaders appeared to hold a certain level of status, in reality American Jews had very little power. Khalidi explained that Jews were ignored by FDR and other policy makers because they COULD ignore them and get away with it. As future generations of Jews became more educated about their rights and savvy about wielding political power, this could no longer happen.

Arab-Americans, who are largely first-generation, are in such a position right now. That is why a House committee chair could deign to hold a hearing on the I-P conflict and ignore the existence of the Arab side. But this will not be the case once Arabs become more savvy about wielding their political clout.

Khalidi feels that the Right of Return will be the thorniest problem to tackle between the two sides, even more difficult than Jerusalem and other territorial issues. The outline of what must happen to resolve this matter is that Israel will have to acknowledge the devasatation that the 1948 Nakba caused to Palestinian life. It won’t even have to apologize. But it will have to concede what happened. In kind, the Palestinians will have to give up their dreams of physically resettling their old homes within Israel proper. These will be two extremely difficult processes for both sides to come to terms with.

He noted that a certain number of Palestinian refugees should return to Israel and those should be the ones in Lebanon. They have never been absorbed into Lebanese society because of the political fracturing of that system. Many of these Palestinians origanally left northern Israeli Arab villages in the Gallilee which still exist. Khalidi’s argument is that these villages could easily reabsorb the refugees who return to them. He believes that Palestinian refugees in other places like Jordan, the U.S., Europe, etc. HAVE been reabsorbed into these societies and so it is far less imperative that they have a physical Right of Return.

By the way, if someone reading this knows Khalidi’s work better than I could you go to the Wikipedia article I link to above and edit it to read more neutrally. As it currently stands, two-thirds of the article details accursations by Khalidi’s critics with no rebuttal whatsoever. These two paragraphs should be entirely rewritten by someone with a more balanced perspective.

tags arab-american-political-power, brit-tzedek, rashid-khalidi, u.s.-mideast-policy

UPDATE: KBCS will rebroadcast this show this Sunday, April 20, 2008 at 7PM.  To listen live to the audio stream, click link in paragraph below.  A zis’n Peysach!

On Sunday, April 1st at 7 PM PDT, I’ll be hosting The Old Country, KBCS’ world music program. The theme will be Passover music since it will air the night before the first seder. Below, is the script I wrote for the show with links to most of the mp3 versions of the songs. Hope you can listen to the show and tell your friends to as well. KBCS is 91.3 FM and you can also listen live to the audio stream. You can also listen to the full hour show here.

A special thanks to Barbie-Danielle DeCarlo, producer of The Old Country for inviting me to do the show. If you like what you read or hear please consider buying a CD using the Amazon links I provide or making a donation to support my work through the Paypal link in my sidebar.

Introduction

Chag Sameach or Gut Yontof! That’s ‘Happy Holiday’ in Hebrew and Yiddish!

Passover or Pesach is one of the most important of the Jewish holidays. To my mind, it is among the most joyous of our celebrations. Other holidays are filled with mirth like Purim and Simchat Torah, but Passover is a festival of joy recollected in tranquility. It is the ultimate holiday of freedom marking the struggle of the enslaved Jews of Egypt to free themselves from bondage and found an independent nation in the Promised Land.

The festivals of the Jewish year revolve around an ancient agricultural calendar followed when Jews lived as farming tribes in the land of Israel. Passover, coming as it does in spring, was considered the New Year festival well before there was such a thing as Rosh Hashanah (which comes in the fall). Because of its association with spring, the holiday has always been connected to Song of Songs, the Biblical book of love, desire and devotion. We’ll be featuring the lyrics of Song of Songs in some of our music tonight.

“Passover” comes from the Hebrew word pasach to ‘pass over,’ which refers to the last of the ten plagues in which the Angel of Death “passed over” the homes of Jews which were smeared with the blood of the Paschal lamb sacrifice.

Passover is an eight day festival. On the first night we celebrate a seder (or ‘order’) by reading a book called the Haggadah (literally, “the telling”). The two most important elements of the seder are the Story and the Meal. The Haggadah is the Story. It recounts the Jews’ exodus from Egypt. It is filled with wise and wonderful sayings and prayers. A good number of them have been put to music. Music plays an important role in any good seder and we’ll be showcasing some of the most memorable songs here tonight. Finally, a seder concludes with a bountiful repast. Any gathering of Jews worthy of the name provides for a meal at which guests can commune, sing, gossip and worship together.

Music:

1. The traditional songs coming up were recorded by Yasmine, a group I co-founded with my brother in the 1980s. The suite includes Baruch HaMakom (“Blessed is the Place”– that is, God), Dayeinu, expressing gratitude to God for the wonderful gifts he bestowed on the Jewish people (“If He had only given us the Torah that would have been enough”), and Avadim Hayinu, a passage from the Passover Haggadah (“We were slaves in Egypt and now we are free”). We’ll be hearing Pesach Suite (hear it) from Yasmine.

Yasmine
Jewish Songs of Celebration & Struggle
Pesach Suite (4:41):
Baruch HaMakom
Dayeinu
Avadim Hayinu

2. Next, we’ll hear from Yehoram Gaon, a golden-voiced Israeli popular singer who’s recorded several collections of music in Ladino. Ladino is a language that integrates Hebrew and Spanish and has been spoken by the Jews of the Mediterranean region (North Africa, Spain, Turkey, etc) for hundreds of years. I’ve included a good number of Sephardic tunes in this program because Seattle has the largest Sephardic Jewish community in the U.S. outside of Brooklyn. I’m featuring Gaon’s Un Cavritico (hear it).

Yehoram Gaon
Songs for Passover in the Sephardic Tradition
Sovre Una Cuanta Mas 1:23
Quen Supiense Y Entendiense 3:05
Un Cavritico 3:45
Shezufat Shemesh 2:24

3. The vocal sextet, The Western Wind, recorded this version of the beloved seder tune, Chad Gadyo (hear it), on their recording, The Passover Story:

Then came the Holy One, blessed be He, and slew the angel of death that killed the butcher that slaughtered the ox that drank the water that quenched the fire, that burned the stick that beat the dog that bit the cat that ate the goat my father bought for two zuzim, Had Gadya (one goat)…

Chad Gadyo is a song in form much like The House That Jack Built or The Twelve Days of Christmas. It is first recorded in a Prague Haggadah from 1590. This version was composed by the famous Yiddish theater composer, Moishe Oysher

The Western Wind
The Passover Story
Chad Gadyo (4:18)
Western Wind Records

4. This 1950 recording of the Yiddish Swingtette is not terribly Yiddish or Jewish (except for the melody derived from the seder tune, Dayenu (hear it). But it shows how a traditional Jewish liturgical song can be refracted through a jazz idiom.

Dave Tarras
Yiddish-American Klezmer Music 1925-1956
Dayeynu (1:42)
Yazoo Records

5. Many listeners may know that Seattle has a large Sephardic community of 5,000 Jews. It’s reported to be the second largest in the country. There are two main synagogues serving the Sephardim. The emeritus cantor of Ezra Bessaroth, one of the two synagogues, Hazzan Issac Azoze, has a 2-CD set devoted to the liturgy of the congregation. He’s graciously provided me this mp3 file for tonight’s broadcast. It is the Ma Nishtanah (hear it) or Four Questions sung in the style of the Jews of Rhodes.

The Four Questions are usually sung by the youngest guest attending the seder. They are meant to teach children the basic rituals observed during the seder by comparing what we do at a normal meal and what we do at a seder:

“Why is it that on all other nights during the year we eat either bread or matzoh, but on this night we eat only matzoh?”
“Why is it that on all other nights we eat all kinds of herbs, but on this night we eat only bitter herbs?”
“Why is it that on all other nights we do not dip our herbs even once, but on this night we dip them twice?”
“Why is it that on all other nights we eat either sitting or reclining, but on this night we recline?”

Information about ordering the CD can be found at http://www.issacazoze.com/

Hazzan Issac Azoze
Liturgy of Ezra Bessaroth
Ma Nishtanah (1:49)

6. On Passover eve, April 19, 1943, German troops moved into the Warsaw ghetto to begin the final liquidation of the remaining ghetto inhabitants. They were met with fierce resistance by 750 Jews who decided to fight to the death rather than submit to the yoke of the tyrant. Max Helfman wrote Di Naye Hagode (“The New Haggadah”) as a requiem for the resistance fighters. It is meant as a “telling” of the tale of the uprising and as a lesson in the modern Jewish struggle for freedom.

It was one of Helfman’s signature compositions, based on a long poem written by the martyred Soviet Jewish poet (murdered by orders of Stalin), Itzik Feffer. Feffer and Helfman seize on the similarities between the plight of the Jewish slaves in Egypt and that of the doomed Jews of the Warsaw ghetto. Just as the former managed to liberate themselves from captivity, both poem and song envision the tragedy of the uprising leading to the overthrow of the cruel Nazi oppressor. I feature here Ma Nishtano (hear it) from Helfman’s composition.

Max Helfman
Di Naye Hagode
Ma Nishtano 5:06

7. Adir Hu (hear it) is traditionally sung as part of the Hallel prayer at the conclusion of the seder:

Mighty is He,
May He soon build His House,
Speedily, speedily in our days.

It anticipates the rebuilding of the Holy Temple and the return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel.

This melody comes from the remarkable Hasidic musician and rebbe, Shlomo Carlebach. He was to Jewish music what Pete Seeger was to folk music: a fertile and fervent purveyor of spiritual Hasidism through music.

Andy Statman & David Grisman
Songs of Our Fathers
Adir Hu/Moshe Emes 4:14

8. In this recording of the seder song, Ki Lo No’e (hear it), we hear the remarkable Sephardic cantor Hazzan Alberto Mizrahi sing a version of another song written by the great Eastern European Jewish composer for Yiddish films, theater and synagogue, Moishe Oysher. While Oysher’s musical heritage derives from the Ashkenazim, Mizrahi makes a Jewish cross-cultural point by embracing this Ashkenazi rendition of the song.

Alberto Mizrahi
Chants Mystiques: Hidden Treasures of a Living Tradition
Ki Lo No’e (4:14)

9. Alain Scetbon’s Haggadah de Pessah is a recording of a traditional Tunisian seder. There are no liner notes accompanying the CD. The album narration is in French and pretty sparse and there’s no narration to Ya Ilana-Rabbi Nessim.
I surmise that Rabbi Nessim was a leading rabbi of 19th or early 20th century Tunisian Jewry and that the song praises him and his spiritual powers. Ilana is a woman’s name, but I have no idea what role, if any she plays in this song.

Prof. Edwin Seroussi, a musicologist and director of the Jewish Music Research Center at the Hebrew University has confirmed that the song is sung in Judeo-Arabic. The language is spoken by North African Jews. Its companion language, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) is spoken by Jews whose origins are in Spain, and the countries to which Spanish Jews fled after 1492.
Ya Ilana-Rabbi Nessim (hear it) is a spirited duet between adult and child male voices accompanied by the oud and rhythmic hand claps. The child’s voice in particular is utterly charming. The boy sings with great gusto and passion and the oud accompaniment ornaments and embellishes the singing beautifully. Perhaps one of our Sephardic listeners can tell me more about this song!
Alain Scetbon
Haggada de Pessah (Ness Music)
Ya Ilana-Rabbi Nessim (3:34)

10. Chava Albertstein is perhaps Israel’s greatest female vocalist in the European chanteuse tradition. In Chad Gadya (hear it), she slyly transforms a Passover children’s song extolling God’s omnipotence into an indictment of the Israeli occupation:

On all nights, all other nights I asked only Four Questions 
This night I have another question: 
“How long will the cycle of violence continue?” 
Chase and be chased, beat and be beaten, 
When will this madness end?
How have you changed, how are you different? 
I changed this year. 
I was once a sheep and a tranquil kid 
Today I’m a tiger and a ravening wolf 
I was once a dove and I was a deer. Today I don’t know who I am.

5:04 Chad Gadya
Chava Alberstein

11. The Ballad of Mauthausen was a book by Iacovos Kambanellis, a survivor of the concentration camp. He persuaded his friend, Mikis Theodorakis to write a musical suite of the same name and both works were published in 1965. They are both screams of protest against the evil of Nazi tyranny and loving memories of the victims in their suffering. Asma Asmaton (hear it), Greek for Song of Songs, is at once a composition of immense grace and pain. You can hear the both the pride and resistance in the Maria Farantouri’s powerful voice as she sings of the victims’ fate:

Beyond the bleak and frozen square / Above the yellow linen star / No heart will ever beat again / Because the beautiful have lost their way to paradise….

Mikis Theodorakis
Ballad of Mauthausen
Asma Asmaton (6:30Page 5 of 6)

Conclusion:

For those of our listeners used to thinking of Jews as only living in America or perhaps Israel, it may come as a surprise that there have been Jewish communities almost everywhere where there has been commerce including in North Africa, India, China, Latin America, Arabia and central Asia. I’ve tried my best to rustle up some music from these far away places to give you a taste of how Jewish music sounds there.

There is Jewish live and recorded music in Seattle though you may have to look hard to find it. You’ll find recordings at the Tree of Life Bookstore on 65th Avenue in Wedgwood). Wendy Marcus led a wonderful klezmer band called the Mazeltones whose records are still available online. She now leads a children’s klezmer band affiliated with Temple Beth Am called Klez Kids. And for Sephardic music and culture, there are Congregations Bikur Holim and Ezra Besoroth in Seward Park.

To find the original posts about these recordings published in this blog search on Passover Music.

tags adir-hu, alain-scetbon-haggada-de-passah-ya-ilana, alberto-mizrahi, andy-statman, asma-asmaton-maria-fanrantouri-mikis-theodorakis-ballad, avadim-hayinu, chad-gadya, chava-albertstein, dave-tarras, dayenu, haggadah, jewish-passover-music, klezmer, max-helfman-di-naye-hagode, moishe-oysher, passover-seder, shlomo-carlebach, western-wind, yehoram-gaon

Someone posted this in a comment thread here and I thought it worthy to turn it into a post in its own right. I have had a bone marrow donor test done already and I recommend anyone who hasn't to have it done. You could give the blessing of life to someone and perform a great mitzvah. Here is the announcement: Zichron Menachem Bone Marrow Drive - Dafna March 08, 2007 Dafna, a mother of 3, is fighting for her life. Bone marrow transplantation could save her. Nowadays, a simple saliva test could help determine the compatibility of potential bone marrow donors. Time is running out for Dafna, a mother of three young children, who must undergo Bone Marrow Transplantation ...

Edward Rothstein and Ronald Radosh have reviewed, in the NY Times and NY Sun respectively, the history exhibition, Facing Fascism, which recently opened at the Museum of the City of New York. The exhibit chronicles the participation of New York City youth in that opening salvo of World War II, the Spanish Civil War. In their reviews (Rothstein in a milder, and Radosh a more virulent form), it seems, they are attempting to refight the battles of the Civil War itself and the subsequent Cold War. Though I have not yet seen the exhibition (I will be in NYC shortly and will try to see it then), it seems that Rothstein-Radosh may have ...

Lots of unintentional humor of a dark kind in today's NY Times article, Rice Hints at U.S. Peace Push on Mideast. It's the type of article that unfortunately reinforces just how dim U.S. policy is toward the Israeli-Arab conflict. First, surprise, surprise, after campaigning on a promise of never trying to impose U.S. will or solutions on the parties to the conflict and spending the last six years coasting on a policy of do-nothingness, Condi Rice has decided that well, maybe she needs to pull a Bill Clinton and actually come up with some creative ideas to move the parties forward: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has opened the door to the possibility that the United States might ...

IDF soldier intimidates at Nablus checkpoint (credit: Rina Castelnuovo/NYT) Steven Erlanger today writes a fine portrait of a Breaking the Silence event in Israel. The group has compiled 400 oral histories of IDF soldiers morally troubled by their Occupation duties. The most telling portion of the article comes near the end when Erlanger records a note of discord from an audience member who lashes out at the Breaking the Silence speaker: While criticism of the army is quite acceptable in Israel’s democracy, and not just on the left, Breaking the Silence left some raw feelings here. At the recent talk and discussion session, one man stood and ...

Google Images has driven thousands of visitors to my site today. They're all trying (and failing) to view this image. For some reason I haven't been able to discover, my blog installation and Google Images don't get along well and the latter doesn't retrieve my images properly. So I thought I'd repost this image originally from the NY Times from happier times when Edwards and Kerry first began their 2004 presidential campaign. I wish for Elizabeth Edwards the strength and courage to fight this thing. I know she has it in her. I know that ...