I am slowly moving back to this site. Till I’m sure it’s up and running properly, I’m going to post to both sites.

I’ll also migrate the posts I wrote in the last few days over here.

Thanks for your patience.

A clearer picture begins to emerge: In California, up till recently, Burkle had mostly a good-guy reputation. He was:

feted as AFL-CIO humanitarian of the year and the Los Angeles County Boy Scouts Jimmy Stewart person of the year, and … is the namesake of the Burkle Center for International Relations at UCLA — to mention but a few of his honors -

Thanks to his “sting” operation on Page Six and Jared Paul Stern, however, he is now

known on Gawker’s salacious Web site and on Page Six as the “greasy grocer,” “babe-loving billionaire,” “paunchy merchant prince” and, perhaps most hurtful of all, “evil rich guy.”

What indicts him in my book is the fact that he’s a thuggish, hypocritical jerk after the fact:

In a recent interview, Burkle said his confrontations with the Fourth Estate merely demonstrated his commitment to the integrity of the press.

“I didn’t want to do it,” Burkle said of the Stern sting. “But I think it actually speaks to the fact that we want to see good journalism…. If I wanted to be disingenuous, I would have worked out some kind of an arrangement [with Stern] and no one would have ever heard about the whole thing.”

And he thinks the unwritten rules of popular journalism should be rewritten just for him.

He also reiterated his oft-repeated distaste for publicity — even as his attempted entry into the news business invited more scrutiny — and insisted that he shouldn’t have to give up his friendships with the rich and famous to make the attention go away.

Actually, maybe the question should be: who’s the Jew?

Answer: the one who wasn’t sentenced to an additional 18 to 20 months in jail before deportation. And who wasn’t upbraided by the judge, who told him:

“You are a master manipulator. You looked your neighbors in the eyes and said you had nothing to do with Palestinian Islamic Jihad. This trial exposed that as a lie,” Judge Moody said. “The evidence was clear in the this case that you were a leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.”

Unfortunately, the Jewish guy is often mistaken for the other guy, Sami al-Arian.

An independent panel appointed by the board of governors of the BBC to analyze its content. The Beeb gets marks for

high quality reporting from location, some outstanding current affairs programmes and the website provides much valuable historical and other context.