The Anchoress

What a great comparative video. Some good comments, too. They’re all astonishing, but I think I most clearly heard the bell with Dessay, Mesple, Sutherland and - surprisingly - Callas until the very end, where she strains. Dahl was very good - she sounded like she still had room above that high E. Also enjoyed Pons, which surprised me, and did not much like Sumi Jo, who seemed like she was working too hard.

But then again - this is a tremendously intricate and difficult aria, so any woman who can pull it off respectably is already doing something impressive.

Continuing the mental health day - some links you might like, a little off the beaten trail - and little commentary:
“Being hated is like voodoo, it only works if you feel hated.”

The Pelosi, unwilling to allow a vote she cannot control, defines the term “petty tyrant,” and demonstrates again that she’d rather adjourn than serve, that her congress is content to do nothing, , at all, rather than work out solutions.

Can UK survive multiculturalism? Good question, good piece. I think you can survive it as long as multiculturalism celebrates the totality of the mosaic, rather than each individual tile. But no one listens to me…

Ace reporter John Allen looks at The Pope and the Pill 40 years after Paul VI’s prophetic encyclical, Humanae Vitae

Steve Schippert finds the Administration leaking information about Iraq. Good thing the press ignores it!

A new translation of the mass has been approved; it’s really more of a return to the more accurate translation of the Latin which we learned right after the Second Vatican Council. Interestingly, I started using the old/now new “Lord I am not worthy” a few years ago - quite spontaneously - as it leaked out of the recesses of my memory, and just went with it. These changes will not be difficult to get used to and will be more precise and focused responses.

Glenn Reynolds watches Barack Obama play his cards. Is Obama a megalomaniac? Does he play his Ace from the bottom of the deck? As Jake Tapper notes - there is name-calling going on, but it ain’t via the McCain camp.

How Green is my politics? That depends.

Hip-Hop Eucharist: Because why appreciate what is timeless when you can stay in the fashion?

Tom Elia looks at the unspoken second line about big oil reports. Interesting.

At 3AM we all look better than we should.

My tires are inflated just fine, thanks. Maybe less hot air would help in the battle about “climate change.”

Vacation must come soon!

My sons made me watch Sasha Baron Cohen last night. Very clever and talented guy. Thought this was pretty good.

You’ve all seen the Che tee shirt, right? The iconic shot of beret-wearing Che Guevara’s face proudly worn by many who likely have no idea who the guy actually was.

The other afternoon, working his summer job making steaming lattes, frappes and other delectable beverages for people willing to spend an enormous amount on coffee and coffee-related-confections in this woeful and nearly depressed economy, Buster found himself facing - for too many times in one day - a coffee lover wearing Che on his chest.

Buster was bored steaming milk, and he decided to have a little fun.

“I like your shirt,” he said to the customer, as he handed him his coffee.

The customer gave a thumbs up sign, “Hey, righteous!”

Buster handed him his change, smiled and leaned back a bit, saying, “But I think I like mine better.”

And he lifted up his work shirt to reveal this one:

“Enjoy your coffee,” Buster said.

The customer, not pleased, puffed out his cheeks, left the store.

Buster’s boss, who likes him because he has a good work ethic, and will work 60 hours a week, if he’s needed, shook his head at Buster and said, “okay for a summer job, but you’re clearly not cut out to work with the public.”

When he told me the story later, I dutifully told him - as a parent - that he should not provoke the customers, and I asked him if he still thought he might go into politics, someday.

“Maybe someday,” he said. “Depends on who wins in the next 20 years, the Che shirts, or the No-Che’s.”

I think we’re all curious about that contest.

This was sent to me by reader Lynda under the header This Debate is Over

I expect the debate will never be over while the evil genius moron Bush lives, and I don’t know if I totally buy Red State’s take on it (I see no liberals laughing) but it’s worth seeing, anyway.

“I am missing Hillary…”

That’s the email I found this morning from a regular correspondent who trends left, and who sent this piece by Dana Milbank along to explain his thinking:

Along the way, he traveled in a bubble more insulating than the actual president’s. Traffic was shut down for him as he zoomed about town in a long, presidential-style motorcade, while the public and most of the press were kept in the dark about his activities, which included a fundraiser at the Mayflower where donors paid $10,000 or more to have photos taken with him. His schedule for the day, announced Monday night, would have made Dick Cheney envious:

11:00 a.m.: En route TBA.
12:05 p.m.: En route TBA.
1:45 p.m.: En route TBA.
2:55 p.m.: En route TBA.
5:20 p.m.: En route TBA.

The 5:20 TBA turned out to be his adoration session with lawmakers in the Cannon Caucus Room, where even committee chairmen arrived early, as if for the State of the Union. Capitol Police cleared the halls — just as they do for the actual president. The Secret Service hustled him in through a side door — just as they do for the actual president.

Inside, according to a witness, he told the House members, “This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for,” adding: “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”

I’d love to know if Milbank is being snarky with that last line, or if Obama actually said it. It sounds like satire…but lately Obama himself sounds like satire, so who can tell.

Jake Tapper is saying there was a preceding line, and that Milbank was selective in his quoting. Say it ain’t so, Jake! We’ve never seen that before in the “legitimate” press, have we?

[Apparently the preceding line was on the order of ""I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions...it's about America; I have become a symbol. Then he launched into his 'this is the moment' schtick.

Ooookay. By the way, excuse me if I thought we, in liberating millions of people from tyranny, vastly weakening a terrorist group that attacked us every two years in the 1990's and saving countless lives in Africa and reducing homelessness by 30% under this president, were already working in "our best traditions"...what could I have been thinking... - admin]

Brackets added for clarity.

Allahpundit has lots of links, pursuing the question of whether or not Obama thinks the world of himself.

It must be said, his campaign has more than helped along the “he already thinks he’s president” meme.

“When the president of the United States goes and gives a speech [overseas], it is not a political speech or a political rally.”
“But he is not president of the United States,” a reporter noted.

I can’t wait for this political season to end.

Hillary said of Obama, “what has he actually done? He gave a great speech, once.”

Richard Cohen is daring to ask the same question.

Bill Clinton called it “the biggest fairy tale” he’d ever seen.

I’m starting to think Bill and Hillary were for once, speaking desperate truth.

130 votes “present” in the Illinois state legislature, 140 working days in the US Senate, no legislation behind him, the thinnest resume possible - and Obama is the president-presumptive. You couldn’t write this scenario - except as farce - and get it published anywhere.

I don’t know if it’s a fairy tale. Maybe it’s all an illusion. The whole question of his prayer at the Western Wall and its subsequent publication rings a bell of illusion (and sleight-of-hand) to this Israeli friend of Donald Sensing’s

All I know is, lately when I see the Automatic President, all I hear is this piece from “Jeckyll & Hyde”:

Related:
The Wheels on the Bus: say hello to Ludacris!
He should have visited the troops alone in Germany. it would have been seen as the right thing to do, not a political move. That was a bad miscalculation on his campaign’s part.
Is Obama’s Economic Outline stealth socialism?
More than one economist is pondering that question and calling yea.
Pursuing Holiness calls Obama the Post-modern PresidentJuliette Ochieng on the black vote in the hip pocket
Michael Novak: the flag is too small to contain Obama
Gateway Pundit has the halo shots

Arghghg….I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Stop writing to me asking me when I am going to respond to you! I may not! Email is totally backed up again - I am so bad at email! And there are about eleventy billion things I want to blog about, but the plate is too full!

However, I am very excited. I just had one of the best conversations I’ve ever had in my whole life - it’s connected to the upcoming online retreat I’ll be hosting, so I can’t share it with you now. But it was great! It was like peeling an onion and discovering John the Baptist, Harry Nilsson, Quentin Tarantino and James Stewart all living within!

But it was such a good conversation that I am regretting my woeful lack of edumacation and wishing I could afford to be a full-time student - what a privilege it is to be able to afford that - to be able to just dedicate oneself to study, and nothing else. I wish I’d had that chance. I may do the next best thing and get back to educating myself by reading more, blogging less. I’ve probably shot my brainwad, anyway. I doubt I have much more to say that could be remotely interesting.

I think the retreat is going to be really, really good. I hope so! Yay! I’m all excited and want to run in the wet grass with no shoes because my brain got an information feed and I’m liking the rush!

In pondering the question of whether or not Team Obama released for publication his prayer at the Western Wall, I wondered if any other politician had done the same. John McCain apparently did not.

There has been a case where the text of a prayer left at the Western Wall was purposely released, but that was a very specific prayer, released for a specific reason. As part and parcel of a whole acknowledgment of wrongs against the Jewish people, John Paul II’s prayer at the Western Wall was made public. It was made public because it was pretty much a signed and stamped historical document, one that has been preserved at Yad Vashem.

We really need to know if Ma’ariv is telling it straight when they say that Obama released the prayer as he left his hotel and headed to the Western Wall. [UPDATE: Says TNR, "Yediot Aharonot, Israel's most popular daily, apparently also received a copy of the note in advance but decided not to print it.' - End Update]

I want to believe he did not…but it must be said that his team’s placement of “Obama” signs at the Kotel - which was pretty inappropriate in that holy place - may well indicate that the prayer was released intentionally.

To which I cannot help but think: Senator Obama, we knew John Paul II, and you are no John Paul II. The prayer - not being a historical document - should not have been released.

Meanwhile…we wait to see if the press will cover any of this.

I hate going here…it makes me feel dirty. But if the Obama team played this card, it needs an answer - a definitive one - and going here is now legitimate.

Well, it’s a better attempt at satire than the New Yorker cover, which utterly failed because it did not go far enough, but…it still doesn’t really work.

Perhaps it’s the smug superiority. It’s so thick, it undercuts the irony.

Ugh.

:::UPDATE:::Okay, so after writing all the reasons why I believed Obama and his campaign meant his prayer at the Western Wall to be private…there comes word from the Israeli paper Ma’ariv - which came under attack for publishing the prayer - that the prayer was released to the press as Obama was leaving the hotel. Which throws everything into doubt. Was the prayer “stolen” or not? Was it ever, in fact, “personal and private” or not? Was the whole thing, after all, staged to gain the sympathy of the religiously inclined, who have been mistrustful of Obama? Am I a schmuck for choosing to believe the best of Obama and his campaign, and not the worst? Has cynicism really trumped everything? What is the truth of this story? Will we EVER know? Will the press EVER ask? Oy!

Big Lizards writes:

Numerous newspapers and other media outlets reported that Maariv claims that “Obama submitted a copy of the note to media outlets when he left his hotel in Jerusalem,” before visiting the wall. This is either true or false:

* If it’s false, why didn’t the reporting media who had reporters present with Obama in Israel say something like, “however, our reporter did not receive any copy of this prayer?” That would certainly have put the onus back on Maariv to prove their statement.

* Contrariwise, if it’s true, then shouldn’t the reporting media point that out in the story, thus putting the lie to the Obama campaign’s claim that this was a terrible violation of the privacy of his divine conversations?

Yet instead of providing the evidence they clearly had, evidence that would either have supported Obama or Maariv, every last media source chose to stand silent. Why?

Donald Sensing tries to make sense of this.

…Ma’ariv’s rather outrageous claim that prayer of non-Jews don’t enjoy privacy protection at the Wall simply will not hold up before rabbinic responses…Anyway, Ma’ariv’s statement that it published what was essentially a press release from Obama’s staff does change the entire tenor of the affair, and makes the seminary student’s confession and repentance somewhat curious.

Is there one mainstream reporter out there who understands that - if the Obama camp released his prayer (and then allowed to stand reports that it was only published because the thing was “stolen”) - this becomes very big deal to the very believers he wishes to court? Is there a reporter out there who will look into it? I won’t hold my breath.

If Obama abused the goodwill of those who wished to believe the best of him - and who decried the publication of his “private” prayer (and many believers did) - that will be pretty shabby, and needlessly cynical. So much for “change.”

I will not say I was wrong to want to think the best, and I’m still going to try to - because I think it’s really important to TRY to think the best - but if this is true…I’ll be incredibly disappointed in Obama, especially since I came down pretty hard - for his sake - on some who may have had his number, after all. Some of my rant - about people criticizing the content of the prayer and reprinting what we thought was private - is still valid…but we don’t know if anything else was.

I thought this was going to be the “candidate of clarity” the “transparency candidacy” - a little clarity here would be welcomed.

Jim Geraghty has more questions.:::END UPDATE:::

:::Original Post Below:::

The Seminarian who removed Obama’s prayer from the Western Wall has returned it:

The yeshiva student who pried Barack Obama’s prayer note from the Western Wall has apologized.

Identified only by the first initial of his name, Aleph, and with his face obscured, the student went on Channel 2 television Sunday to confess that he took the presidential contender’s note last week and passed it to the press.
…
“I’m sorry. It was a kind of prank,” Aleph said, his hands shaking as he fingered the tightly wadded-up sheet of King David Hotel letterhead. “I hope he wasn’t hurt. We all believe he will take the presidency.”

This weekend I received many emails - a few of them pretty insulting - from people on the right who either mocked me as naive, or castigated me as a stupid dupe for believing that this prayer was really stolen, and that the whole event was not a choreographed publicity stunt from the Obama camp, meant to garner sympathy from the religious right.

It must be said that the religious right - by and large, and to its credit - was horrified by this theft, and defensive of Obama’s right to private prayer. One cannot help wondering if - had the exact same circumstances occurred to President Bush - anyone on left, religious or otherwise, would have been able to manage even a sneeze of outrage on the president’s behalf.

And that is the point.

As I responded to many of these emailers, there were several reasons why I rejected the notion that the Obama camp had staged the theft, the most obvious being that the campaign would have to realize that such a “choreography” would immediately be suspected, as we are all too savvy and too cynical to be “taken in” by much these days. Consider how many people dared to criticize the content of the prayer, either because it was too vague and “safe” sounding, or because it did not whistle The Stars and Stripes Forever upon opening, and you realize that no campaign would be stupid enough to stage something so bound to be a lose/lose for their candidate, where “too much” or “too reverent” a prayer would offend the left and too little would offend the right.

Secondly, the reaction of the Obama campaign told me that the theft was real. Had it been manufactured, the campaign, which sometimes seems like it employs a roving “Outrage of the Day Department” was quiet about it. I know that had my prayer been stolen and published, I would not wish to add to the abuse of that prayer by making statements and drawing further attention to it. I’d simply let it go, and that’s what Obama did. (There is something to be said for heeding the advice of Atticus Finch, and walking around in the other guy’s shoes for a while.)

Thirdly - as some of you know from our email exchanges - I refused to think the matter was staged because I did not want to become like the Bush-haters I know, who are incapable of naming “one good thing” about the man. I refused to give up that much of my own humanity, in order to de-humanize Barack Obama.

That is the trend, these days, of course. Name-call, deride, mock, disbelieve and in all ways go negative - on every issue, in every instance, unto perpetuity - on any politician with whom you disagree, and any pundit you don’t like, and any blogger who does not see things the way you see them. In that way, they immediately become less human to you, and the less human they seem, the easier they are to hate, and continue to hate.

We see it all the time, all over the blogosphere: repellent hate. It begins with calling someone a nasty name, which seems like nothing. But it is the beginning of the whole process of dehumanization, and it is why one of my rules about comments is that name-calling of presidents is off-limits. Bush becomes “Chimpy.” Obama becomes “O-Bambi.” Rosie O’ Donnell becomes “Rosie Oaf Donnell.” Cindy McCain becomes “the pill-addict Cheerleader,” (ah, the tolerant and compassionate!) and John McCain becomes “McShame,” and from there, it’s a very short walk onto the endless and descending pier of hate, which leads you to a place where we can no longer see anything good in “the other,” because you have made yourself willfully blind, and willfully hard-hearted.

When you reach that point, you are no better than the person you hate; you may be much worse.

I believed Obama’s prayer had been stolen and I would not give in to the easy suspicions of cynicism, because I realized that as long as I could name “one good thing,” about Obama - and in this case it would be that he left a real prayer, in real humility, at the wall - I could still see him as a real person and not an object of revilement.

And it would mean I hadn’t completely lost my humanity, either.

I can name other good things about Barack Obama, but for now, let’s concentrate on naming “one” good thing. It is a helpful gauge - a way to keep some perspective.

Early in this blog - to my everlasting shame - I found myself treading the “everyone on the other side is vile” pier, and I did not like where it led.

There be monsters, all reflecting myself.