How quickly I’ve forgotten the highlights of campaign ‘08 so far, so I was really pleased to watch Baracky, the Movie:

Terrified that their name and reputation have been besmirched by the casually anti-Semitic shitheads Walt and Mearsheimer (and by the big bad pro-Israel Jews of AIPAC), some “good” pro-Israel Jews launch a competing lobbying group:

Some of the country’s most prominent Jewish liberals are forming a political action committee and lobbying group aimed at dislodging what they consider the excessive hold of neoconservatives and evangelical Christians on U.S. policy toward Israel.

The group is planning to channel political contributions to favored candidates in perhaps a half-dozen campaigns this fall, the first time an organization focused on Israel has tried to play such a direct role in the political process, according to its organizers.

Organizers said they hope those efforts, coupled with a separate lobbying group that will focus on promoting an Arab-Israeli peace settlement, will fill a void left by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and other Jewish groups that they contend have tilted to the right in recent years.

Good Jews, bad Jews—we’re all one people. And some of our people are in a pretty shitty situation in Israel. That is what we should be working to resolve, not our own penny-ante status-anxiety concerns here at home.

NYU’s John Sexton sells out to Abu Dhabi:

Sexton argues that the plan will vault the university into the top echelons of global academia. The scale of Abu Dhabi’s support, he says, will help NYU to expand its student body by 4,000 over the next 25 years, to boost its meager endowment (currently about one-fourteenth the size of Harvard’s), and to transform itself into a “glocal” university. He knows such dramatic changes will make some faculty anxious, but he believes that when they consider the opportunity as much as he has, they’ll come around. To Sexton, growth is by definition virtuous, and international engagement a matter of moral courage.

Speaking as a longtime neighbor, I can state without equivocation that there is nothing virtuous about NYU’s growth. NYU is the nastiest local corporate citizen this side of its ugly uptown cousin Columbia—utterly disgraceful to its NoHo and East Village neighbors.

And I haven’t even begun to outline the serious issues at stake in terms of an American university now being beholden to “benefactors” from an alien—and I do mean alien—source.