I am a bad man who had no intention of driving to the Valley tonight for a "Taste of Limmud" until I found out that Danielle Berrin was going to lecture on Jewish Journalism:
Luke Ford, Joey Kurtzman drive to "A Taste of Limmud" in Valley Village. We talk Torah and kundilini yoga and hybrid cars and girls and sex and spirituality. Complete video.
Andrew: "The number one reason is that the conservative movement has completely detached itself from pop culture and thinks it can survive in the 21st Century on politics and legislation alone and political rhetoric and great writing reflecting conservative principles. That is not going to happen. What needs to happen is that the conservative movement, based in Washington D.C. for the most part with ancillary entitiies in New York City, Dallas, Virginia, these people have ignored anything west of the MIssississippi for a generation. They’re suffering the consequences. The election of Barack Obama is evidence of that. The conservative movement did not embrace Ronald Reagan initially. He was successful…because he came from Hollywood and understood the importance of communication and pop culture. It took the conservative movement a long time to realize that that magic was a good way to sell conservatism.
"The conservative movement needs to focus on Hollywood in countless ways. It needs to encourage its young to go out to Hollywood to become screenwriters, actors, producers, below the line workers. It also needs to focus on Hollywood proper — film reviews and become engaged in the debate out there. We have so many people in the conservative movement who write about legislation and political controversies every single day. There seems to be about 50 people writing on the same subject every day but few people concentrate on pop culture, the DNA of who we are, and we export that through our satellite dishes and DVDs and on the television screen and on films across the world. If we don’t alter that DNA, if we don’t try to inject into it our best qualities and not our worst qualities, our fate is in the hands of people who don’t agree with us. We have to take them on using their skills.
"The secondary objective of the site is to create cover for those who exist in Hollywood now who are conservative or libertarian or consider themselves Lieberman Democrats or JFK liberals or anyone who dissents from the boutique liberalism that seems intent on squashing any kind of dissent….We want to provide protection from the bullies out here who are rarely punished for their bad behavior. We want conservatives and non-liberals in Hollywood to come out and express their point of view as freely as Sean Penn. They’ll also be able to represent their point of view in the product they make so that movies and TV will show that there are two parties, two basic philosophies, and there needs to be some representation in the arts from the other."
Luke: "Is this the big project your soul has been yearning for?"
Andrew: "Good question."
"The last time I was interviewed by you was for the book Hollywood, Interrupted, which I wrote with Mark Ebner. It was an emotional reaction to Hollywood’s lack of participation in the war effort… The people who were benefitting the most from this country refused to take even a neutral stand with regard to defending this country… History will show that many celebrities were at the forefront of building an anti-war movement. and fomenting anti-Americanism abroad… I have had countless people tell me that they don’t agree [with the reigning leftist ideology in Hollywood] but they need cover to represent themselves. That they need to make enough money to send their kids through college to feel comfortable to speak out against a Sean Penn. How crazy is it that Sean Penn feels so comfortable going to Cuba and Venezeula and Iraq before that and he knows when he gets back from those trips and knows that the powers that be in Hollywood have no problem with that.
"When a Hollywood conservative supports the president of the United States in a time of war is fearful he won’t have a job on Monday when he comes home because the establishment media will expose him, mock him, and if he was an A-list star, turn him into a C-list star. The Frank Riches of the world are so brilliant at a turn of phrase. He did it with Ron Silver, who was his favorite actor. He wanted him to help a Broadway renewal campaign in the 1990s when he was a good liberal. Later in a column, after Silver addressed the Republican convention in 2004, he described him as a D-list actor. It’s that simple turn of phrase in the New York Times or any other liberal publication where you can take a person for whom their reputation is everything and you can diminish it overnight. It’s the same thing that gay activists did for people who supported Prop 8. It’s done writ large every day here. When people find out that someone is on the other team, the whisper campaign and emails go back and forth and people say, ‘That person is dead to me.’ The town is a social town. People choose to work with people they feel comfortable. If people feel comfortable saying on a set that George Bush is Hitler, that means that somebody who voted for him is a Nazi and who wants to work with a Nazi?
"I don’t call it a specific blacklist. It’s not written down. I don’t think there’s a Red Channels out there. It does not need to be. The system is so entrenched, people are so intimidated into silence, there is no need for a blacklist."
Luke: "Most conservative intellectuals think pop culture as below them?"
Andrew: "That’s right. That’s where I come in. I’m not an intellectual."
Thanks to the glories of growing up with pay cable, Andrew says he’s had the opportunity to see Susan Sarandon naked as often as her husband Tim Robbins.
Andrew: "I had a friend come out to Los Angeles to appear on the Bill Mahr show two years ago. He told me that Tim Robbins was going to be on the panel with him along with Paula Poundstone. This is a guy who appears on Meet the Press. He writes for a conservative publication but is featured on CNN all the time and is really considered a straight reporter. He wrote a book saying that Saddam Hussein had a relationship with Al Qaeda.
"I told him it was not like going into the green room at NBC in D.C. and running into Madeline Albright or Barney Frank, people with whom you have political disagreements. People out here in Hollywood are vicious. They will not treat you with dignity. They will not give you the benefit of the doubt. He said, that’s crazy.
"We went into the green room. It’s a tiny room. And the whole time, Tim and Susan sat with their backs to us.
"It’s not like it is in Washington D.C. where you’re in the less cool group. You’re kinda the nerd on campus. That’s what conservatives are. You are the pariah here. He couldn’t believe it until he witnessed it."
"I don’t take venture capital money. The hard part is trying to do the website with limited resources. I’m not as technically competent as one would think. I rely on other people to do this stuff for me, to make my ideas come true."
As first reported by the Awareness Center several weeks back, Cantor Stanley Rosenfeld is back in prison after violating the terms of his probation twice. Although full details are still not available, court dockets indicate that Judge Nugent and Magistrate Revens have held violation hearings and ordered both a presentence repreport and a competency examination. The last hearing was January 9, 2009.
Stanely Rosenfeld is a former cantor and spiritual leader at Temple Am David who received a 10-year suspended sentence after pleading no contest to molesting a 12-year-old boy he was tutoring. He grew up in New York City and worked in the New York public school system for about 20 years, and worked about 10 years at a private Jewish academy in New York. In a recent lawsuit it was alleged that other Jewish synagogues had problems with Rosenfeld, but he was allowed to move from one to another and offend again. In previous probation reports Rosenfeld acknowleged constantly having to ‘fight his desire for boys.’ He said he often looks at children when driving and had ‘considered what it would be like to pursue a child’ but that he has never acted on this desire." The report also says that, "When asked if he had molested both male and female children, [Rosenfeld] responded that his ‘preferred prey’ is adolescent boys." Rosenfeld has acknowledged other victims within Rhode Islandas well as victims in different states, demonstrating his clear propensity to commit these crimes against minors. Rosenfeld also told stated in past probation reports that he had molested boys when he was in New York, but he was never charged
Hopefully, this is the end of the line for pedophile Rosenfeld who will now rot in jail.
I’m glad I bought my ticket Friday because the screening was sold out.
Afterwards, movie director Ari Folman spoke. I got video.
Interviewer: "Several years ago, at age 40, when you were looking to get of the Israeli reserve army…"
Ari: "You serve until age 50 in the reserves… I was not a big fighter in the reserves. I was a screenwriter. I was writing short instructional movies for TV, like how to defend yourself from the Iranian atomic attack in 60 seconds. I had this agreement with the army. I don’t have to wear a uniform. I don’t have to get out of bed. They can call me whenever they want. So you go to the hospital with your wife so she can give birth and they call you just as he is about to be born. There’s this house there and chemicals, give us 60 seconds. It’s always the wrong time. I told them, I want to get out.
"They said, ‘We’re having this experiment. If you go see the army’s therapist and tell them what you went through in your regular service, we will let you out. I went for it. After eight or ten sessions, I realized it was the first time I heard myself speak about what I went through during the service. The story was not that extraordinary. It was that it was so deep down suppressed. It was not that I had total amnesia. I had the main storyline, but there were black holes. Then I went out and discussed it with my best friends and I realized I knew nothing about what [they went through]. They were the same age."
Interviewer: "You had not kept touch with the soldiers you served with?"
Ari: "I cut ties with all people I served with. I made this decision at age 22. I decided to forget. I worked hard at it. And I did succeed."
"Repression is a great thing. It is a matter of survival."
Interviewer: "The filmmaking was enjoyable, the therapy not so much."
Ari: "The hardest thing was the decision to do the film. Once I made the decision, the film was not so hard."
"In the research, we had more than 100 testimonies… I went through nothing compared to all those other guys who contacted us after we put that ad on the internet. I consider myself lucky."
"It’s an animated film. It never was any other kind of film. Memories of war, subconscious, dreams, lost youth, everything. The only way to combine it into one smooth storyline was through animation."
Interviewer: "If you had, we probably wouldn’t be here."
Ari: "I wouldn’t, and you wouldn’t be here."
"If it would’ve been a classic documentary, you would see middle-aged men telling their memories from the war. Then you’d have to cover it with footage and you can’t find any footage that will resemble what they are talking about. Then if you make a big action war movie with the budget of an Israeli movie, well, it can be sad. There was not any other option."
Ari says the film has led to major discussion in Israel "but not the kind of political discussion I was expecting. I expected it to be immediately categorized as left-wing and anti-Zionist… None of that happened. The film became the darling of the establishment. Wherever I go, there are consuls waiting for me. They pay to send the film all over the world. They have receptions. It’s kind of weird considering how the IDF is shown. They support it for two reasons — it shows Israel is a pluralist country. Here’s a soldier who went to war and he can say whatever he wants. And then, at least in Europe, where people do know a lot of Middle Eastern politics, it is their first time to realize that the Israeli troops didn’t commit the massacres [of Sabrila and Chatilla]. This is propaganda the Israeli government couldn’t buy for money."
Interviewer: "There were eight production babies and three of them were yours."
Ari: "I was pretty busy."
"I wanted to dedicate this film to my sons but my wife wouldn’t let me. Why dedicate them a film with all those bodies at the end? Maybe one day you make a nice love story and you dedicate that to them? I did what she said."
"This is my anti-war declaration. I couldn’t phrase it in any different way. I really hope that when my boys grow up to see the film, there won’t be a lot to discuss about."
"It was complicated. I wanted to show war in a non-glorifying way. No bravery. No glory. No glam. Unlike a lot of American anti-war movies, they tell the kids, see the movie, you see war sucks, but the guys in the movie are really cool and they take it the wrong way and they say, ‘Oh, I want to be in Iraq. Just look at the guy in… Look at the bravery issues. Look at friendship.’
"On the other hand, I didn’t want to show the Israeli soldiers as victims, which is very popular now in Israel. They have this term — shoot and cry. This genre of Israeli movies about soldiers who have to go to war and shoot up other people and then they come back home and they cry. There were other victims on a different scale in this episode. It was complicated in terms of the narrative."
"There are nine interviews in the film and seven of them are the same guy. A couple of them at the last moment got cold feet and they didn’t appear for bizarre reasons. One guy didn’t want people to know he smokes pot. We had to bring in an actor. He listened to the original recordings and we invented a new face."
"I don’t believe films can change the world. They can build bridges. You can’t change public opinion. I was talking to the head of Sony Studios yesterday. He couldn’t understand how the extreme majority of Israeli citizens could love this film and support what’s going on in Gaza every day. I told him this is typically Israeli. Yes, we think this film is essential because it shows you what war is, but sometimes we have to do what we have to do. Unfortunately, it did not change anything."
This is only the second animated Israeli movie. The first one was made in 1961 — Joseph and His Brothers.
There’s a question asking the director if there’s a comparison between the Holocaust and the massacres of Sabra and Chatilla.
Ari: "I have traveled with the film for eight months. Everywhere I go, except Israel, I get asked about the Holocaust. For us, the Holocaust is deep in the DNA. Not just for me, I come from an extreme hardcore Holocaust survivor family. We see footage of massacres, be it Sabra and Chatilla, Rwanda, Bosnia, and it will immediatey spark memory of the past. Never in the history of Israel was there such an outraged response, demonstrations, like the day after the Sabra and Chatilla massacres, although Israeli troops didn’t do it.
"If you ask yourself why, I tell you it was only because of the Holocaust. Immediately after the massacre, people realized that something really wrong went on there with the support and the collaboration of the Israeli government and the Christian regime. They were our allies. They wore IDF uniforms. The demonstrations were held because they couldn’t believe that people with out history could be related to the massacres of Sabra and Chatilla.
"Where the press and the public was obsessed with this comparison was Germany. They couldn’t understand it. Germany is the only territory where the film was distributed and it didn’t work. The Germans said, how could you? And no one came to see the film."
"The film does not compare Israelis with Nazis. Of course I wouldn’t compare Israelis with Nazis because I don’t think Israelis are Nazis."
"The eight months I’ve spent traveling with the film have been much more difficult than the four years I spent making the film, which were great fun."
"When Sony bought the film, I was told I would have to come over for the awards season. I didn’t know what that meant. Now I see there’s the NBA season, the NFL season and the awards season. Every few days there’s a game where I’m competing with the same films, the same directors, since Cannes. They win. I win. They’re really obsessed with prizes here. Every day there’s a new guild. I wake up and there’s a phone call from Israeli radio. "Congratulations, you won the guild of critic writers.’ Wow. It’s the hot season."
I am a bad man who had no intention of driving to the Valley tonight for a "Taste of Limmud."
I am a bad man who had no intention of driving to the Valley tonight for a "Taste of Limmud" until he found out that Danielle Berrin was going to lecture about hard-hitting Jewish Journalism.
Here is the exact title of her presentation: "Digging for the Dirt: How Jewish Values Inform Hard-Hitting Journalism."
Come on! I wrote the book on Jewish Journalism. What’s this girl doing talking about my topic? I’m the authority, not this freakishly gorgeous actress!
I thought, "What the hell does Danielle Berrin know about hard-hitting Jewish journalism? She’s the Journal’s Calendar Girl. She writes fluff pieces. She’s beautiful and fluffy and she has great manners but hard-hitting? She’s sweet. You need to be an SOB like me to write hard-hitting articles."
Damn, I’ve got to go to this. I’m going to her talk. I’m gonna tape it. Then I’m going home and tearing her to shreds.
I feel like I have no friends at the top of this thing and I will just exacerbate my pariah status but damn it will be fun.
I am a bad man and I should be true to myself and I should tear Danielle Berrin to shreds and feed her to the lions.
Such jolly fun!
So I got Joey Kurtzman to give me a ride. This LimmudLA event was co-sponsored by JConnectLA and it had a far higher percentage of young people than normal. The house in Valley Village was beautiful, decorated by the owner’s paintings of various hot chix. I dig.
I ate and shmoozed and smacked my lips in anticipation of Danielle’s talk.
She was with this AJU rabbinic student who looked like he could definitely kick my ass.
I ended up sitting right next to him as Danielle rose to give her talk. (Listen)
And damn it all if she wasn’t good. If she wasn’t gracious. If she didn’t give me props and solicit my thoughts. I am a legend in my own mind and when other people give me just the smallest props I’m as grateful as a puppy dog.
I’m so much nicer in person. On my blog, I’m a bastard. I’m a keyboard warrior. In person I’m shy and scared and insecure and filled with shame and self-loathing.
"I did not study journalism. So it’s only natural that my education would come at the hands of a big Hollywood director. About a year ago, my Editor said to me, ‘Danielle, we’ve never had Hollywood in our paper. It’s really important. There’s this massive Jewish community at our doorstep and we don’t know who they are and we’re not accessing them and there’s all this mythology about Jews running Hollywood and what’s that about?’ I said, ‘Hollywood? No problem.’ Who cares that I am from Miami and that I am probably the least connected person here.
"I met Brett Ratner. He is a high-profile successful Hollywood director. He makes big popular commercial films such as Rush Hour. His films have grossed over a billion dollars at the box office. He’s also from my home town of Miami.
"He gave me his phone number. I said, this is going to be my big Hollywood entre.
"I ran into him again. I had enough of the cat-and-dog chase. I said, ‘I’m not going to take no for an answer.’ He said, ‘OK, come to my home tonight.’
"He has this mythology where he got into Hollywood by not taking no for an answer and talked his way into the upper echelons of Hollywood.
"I showed up to his house with pad and paper and tape recorder. Over the course of four hours, I had an interesting conversation with him. He was forthright and candid with me. As he got more comfortable, he started making some come-hither comments about how I looked or what he wanted to do with me. Then he offered me a tour of his house… He starts in the underground disco basis, which is like a Las Vegas nightclub.
"Over the course of the evening, he became more and more comfortable with me as his companion. He got strangely touchy. I walked out there feeling really deflated. I had to ask myself, did I compromise my integrity to get this interview? It was so important to me. Nothing severe happened, but as a woman, it was a humiliating experience.
"This was my first lesson in journalism.
"As I went to write the story, it was really difficult. It took me two weeks to get it down on paper. I asked myself, do I write it as a straight profile or do I tell the fuller picture of what my experience was when I went to interview him?"
"I wrote the story as it happened. There was a lot of discussion of whether that would be the right thing and the potential consequences to me as a brand new journalist and especially because I am endeavoring to get into the Hollywood scene, to shame a Hollywood director who could potentially help you out, but I realized I couldn’t write it any other way.
"It was written about in the LA Times. The LA Times called Brett Ratner to see if it was true. My journalistic integrity was challenged… Sure enough, I had the facts to back it up. I recorded the entire evening.
"I didn’t even write the worst of what happened."
Whoa! I wonder what that means. Did he pull it out and scream, "Interview this!"?
Danielle: "I was pretty nice. In the end, Brett’s comments to the LA Times reporter were fair, he knew I was being kind to him in more ways than one."
Danielle’s AJU rabbinic student says: "Proust says about Rembrant that when Rembrandt came into the world, you couldn’t help but look through the world but with the eyes of a Rembrandt. Once something great comes around, it changes the way people see things… Jewish journalism is [seeing the world] through Jewish eyes."
I know I have not been the same since I read Danielle’s journalism. It evokes Rembrandt and Proust, but Rembrandt and Proust at their best. Their highest selves, not the swill they’d churn out for the masses.
Speaking of Proust, Joey Kurtzman said: "I did that for two-and-a-half years [at Jewcy.com]. Jewish journalism. Jewish content. Content looked at through the lens of a Jewish sensibility. But what is the Jewish sensibility? I can report that I am no closer to the answer after two-and-a-half-years."
My friend Danny, who majored in journalism, tells Danielle: "I’ve noticed that the Jewish Journal tends to focus [its reporting on] scandals among the Orthodox."
Danielle disagrees.
Danny: "The non-observant Jews put the Orthodox under a magnifying glass just like the non-Jews put Jews and Israel under a magnifying glass."
Danielle: "We could go on all night about who we cover more…"
She gives an example of a story the Jewish Journal found out about and she asks us it the paper should report it: "A young woman (around 18yo) comes to a rabbi for counseling (he’s married with kids) and ends up having an affair with him. What do we do?"
Bloke: "Who’s catering?"
Danielle: "The claim was that a prominent rabbi took advantage of his position with vulnerable young woman who came to him with some real issues."
"We had another example where a rabbi was just having an affair with another married woman. We determined not to report it because it was an affair between two consenting adults."
Woman: "You have an advantage. You don’t have to sell on sensationalism whereas most other publications do. People don’t read the Journal for scandal."
Danielle: "But you know when there is scandal? You know how many more hits we get on the website? As opposed to when I interview another Hollywood executive making another Holocaust film, no one cares, they want to hear about the Brett Ratners taking advantage of the little amateur journalist."
"It is important to be provocative and interesting without crossing the line to ‘Alien Jews From Milky Way Land Set Up Shul On Pico And Take Over.’"
Ratner has been on the receiving end of a lot of snarky press over the years, but what made this startling was that it ran in the Jewish Journal. I couldn’t help but wonder what Brett’s reaction was to being painted as a Lothario in L.A.’s leading Jewish newspaper. What did he think?
I called Ratner on Sunday, just to make sure Berrin didn’t make this all up–or was wildly exaggerating. He’d read the story, but was surprisingly unperturbed. "Some of the stuff she did was unfair, like the part about the books," he told me. "I didn’t brag about how expensive the books were. She was the one who asked me how much they cost. I was just answering her question. But she’s pretty smart, because she didn’t have a pen and she wasn’t recording anything, so I don’t know how she remembered everything so well."
And what about him hitting on her? "I didn’t hit on her," he says. "I was flirting, but it wasn’t as bad as she made it out. I don’t remember being quite that aggressive. I mean, flirting is just flirting. I think she exaggerated a lot of it, maybe because she was trying to get her boyfriend jealous. We talked about a lot of serious things in the story, but I guess that’s not what anyone’s going to write about when they write about me."
UPDATE: Berrin just emailed me, wanting to clarify the issue of how she reported the story. She says: "I had my tape recorder in plain view when I interviewed Brett, which would confirm everything he said. I also took handwritten notes."
At the end of the night, I introduced myself to Esther D. Kustanowitz by holding up a piece of paper saying, "Hi, I’m big bad Luke."
Then I whipped out my charm and got to work.
Here Joey and I drive to the event and talk Kundilini yoga:
On the ride home, Joey says he used to drive an ambulance and was "trained in the art of defensive driving."
Joey: "I chose the Journalistic Ethics class for the purest of reasons. It was just a lovely coincidence [that Danielle gave it]. A lovely young woman."
Luke: "Tall, slender, blonde, gracious. Beautiful manners. A real credit to the Jews. It makes me proud to be a Jew."
Joey: "She’s a sterotype-buster. She’s lovely and well-spoken and she had a confident-assertiveness about her."
Luke: "And she did a good job. I was totally ready to rip her if she didn’t do a good job. I’d say she’s all looks but she’s shallow but I couldn’t say that tonight."
Joey: "She’s kinda ballsy. She opened by discussing this unpleasant sexual thingy with the director [Brett Ratner]. When she starts with that, you’re thinking, oh we’re in LA and the first thing we hear is about how a director hit on her, but as she ended up relating it, it was an important issue and she handled it with sophistication."
Luke: "It’s her best piece of writing. It was funny, brave, ballsy. And most important of all, it was compelling to read. And it was a compelling way to bring up this topic of hard-hitting Jewish journalism. Danielle Berrin is not this hyper-accomplished 55 year old fat man who’d just come from Afghanistan…"
"I want to know what was the horrible thing that Brett Ratner did that she didn’t expose."
Joey: "She said he talked about the kind of things he’d like to do with her."
Luke: "I wonder if they were purely intellectual."
We go over Coldwater Canyon.
Luke: "The light is green. We can go."
Joey: "Luke is an anxious passenger…"
Luke: "I had this girlfriend I’d bully when she drove. She was passive. We almost got into a lot of accidents because her nerves would be shot from my bullying. Now I get into other people’s cars and I’ve got all these bullying habits ingrained in me."
Joey: "You can feel free to do that with me. I won’t get rattled."
Luke: "My favorite type of women are masculine women. I don’t like beards and excessive muscles, I like socially-adjusted accomplished women, women who are different from me. Hard strong tough women. Not tortured artist blogger types. Now I find myself bullying chicks ten times as tough as I am and it is silly and futile."
Joey: "You’re attracted to those you can learn from. If that’s who they are, they’ll tell you what’s up."
Luke: "They’re just kinda amused."
"Have you ever had people who were so desperate to be in your life that they let you bully them? When people let me bully them, I bully them."
"I remember there was this chubby chick who liked me in fifth grade. I kicked her until she cried. And she said, ‘I love you. One day you will find out what it is like to love someone and have them kick you.’
"I would leave tacks on her chair with the pointy end up.
"I’d go left here."
Joey: "Yes."
Luke: "I’d leave tacks on her chair so she’d sit on them with her fat little tush. Tears would spring to her eyes. I kicked her and I left tacks on her desk because she liked me."
Joey: "That’s women. The more the guy is emotionall unavailable, the more desperately they want him. The women I find most enchanting are the women who are often emotionally unavailable. I hope you don’t beat yourself up over that. Attraction is messy. It is a typical human thing. People take the liberties they can."
Luke: "I remember confessing things like this in therapy and I’d blush and be all wrecked and ashamed and she’d say, ‘Luke, you were eleven years old.’ Oh, OK.
"But I am still ashamed and I still carry it with me."
Joey: "Why? You’re ashamed in the present?"
Luke: "I see Danielle Berrin and I know I’ve written cruelly about her at times and I feel like the guy who thumbtacks on a girl’s desk and kicked her and how I bullied a past girlfriend and then I think I may have bullied [Danielle and Esther Kustanowitz and Amy Klein etc] on my website and I feel ashamed. [It’s all connected.] On the other hand, I don’t regret anything I’ve written. I think it was true and accurate, but it feels emotionally like bullying. It’s like picking on a defenseless kid. Danielle Berrin is not going to be writing anything vicious."
Joey: "She’s a strong woman who knows how to look after her own business."
"I had this inflated sense of my own emotional power over other people. I had to get over it. Joey, they’ve got a whole universe and you’re just a tiny part of it. It’s not an excuse to be a jerk but I had to learn humility. I had to get over my own terror of hurting someone."
"The tragedy of very nice guys is that they end up thinking all women are whores because they don’t want to sleep with them. They end up the most embittered. ‘I was a nice guy. I didn’t do anything but try to anticipate what she wanted and throw it at her. And she went off and f—ed someone else. What a whore.’"
We’re at Wilshire on Rexford.
Luke: "I’d go straight."
"You don’t recall a whole bunch of rejections from attractive women that continue to haunt your psyche?"
Joey: "It’s possible I’m in denial."
"Even men who don’t harbor feelings of revenge can find pornography quite enticing."
Luke: "We were talking to a guy tonight who was doing his PhD in pornography and he claimed he’s never looked at pornography. I don’t understand. I think every guy has to have some fetish…that will send him over the edge. Maybe he hasn’t been exposed to it and lucky for him."
ChaimAmalek: Luke, I am sorry to hear that you have taken a vow of eternal chastity. It is not required of you by Judaism, but I respect your decision
ChaimAmalek: You must be pure for your yoga
ChaimAmalek: And coitus only tenses the chakras
FATS: where’s the entertainment in this chatroom
ChaimAmalek: Ever since Luke gave up sex, the women have stayed away and so too the men
ChaimAmalek: Only the celibate gather here
FATS: that’s true!
ChaimAmalek: I think what Luke needs is for some woman to go over to his hovel and rape him right on the cam
FATS: Luke lives in a fortress – he doesn’t have to be afraid of rape
ChaimAmalek: It would have to begin with her locating his stash of levitra, grinding up a pill, disolving it in water and than admiinstering it to him as an enema
ChaimAmalek: Then she, and maybe this would require several women, would have their way with Luke live for us to see.
ChaimAmalek: The mic would be on, and we would hear Luke crying out "Rabbi …, forgive me!"
ChaimAmalek: You ladies want him. You ladies should get over there NOW and do him
ChaimAmalek: When you are done, force Luke to do something he finds especially degrading. Like getting a job
If you google cdr and lawsuits you will find 18 municipalities have filed lawsuits against them in addition to the FBI raid of their offices in 2006 and the ongoing investigation. David Rubin is friends with future Orthodox Union leader (executive vice-president) Rabbi Steven Weil.
I wonder how convincing is it for Bill Richardson to claim ignorance about bribery? If someone gives you money and you give them business, can you say, oh that guy took advantage of every municipality south of the Mason-Dixon line?
Rubin gets cities to go out and raise money through the likes of Goldman Sachs. That gives cities some cachet to tap into people like Goldman who will buy the bonds from places such as South Carolina Hickville. The city may not want to use the money right away. Rubin came up with a way for the city to invest the money while they wait to build a freeway or the like. So while the city may owe the bondholders 4%, they can make say 7% on their money through Rubin. The IRS has a problem with it because it is arbitrage. You can borrow money at 4% because the bond interest is tax-exempt. If you invest the money at a profit, the IRS can rule that the bond interest is no longer tax free, which results in a disaster for the investors.
David Rubin told municipalities that he had a way of avoiding this IRS scrutiny. This was not true. It bollixed the whole deal. He gets cities to use his services based on misstatements of fact (according to this SEC filing).
When the SEC told David Rubin, you have to stop breaking the law, it destroyed Rubin’s business.
Ever since New Mexico governor Bill Richardson withdrew his nomination for Commerce Secretary citing an investigation into the company that obtained a contract to advise the state on bond deals, news reports have been making reference to a broader nationwide probe of alleged price-fixing and corruption in the municipal bond industry, which the New Mexico investigation grew out of.
Here at Muckraker, we’ve started looking into that larger ongoing story, and today the New York Times delivers a helpful takeout on the subject — though many of the details still remain murky.
…CDR, the firm that’s being investigated in New Mexico, leading to Richardson’s withdrawal, is one such company that handles derivatives.
That firm and two that do similar work — Investment Management Advisory Group, (known as "Image"), and Sound Capital Management — had their offices raided by the FBI in 2006 as part of the investigation.
The former Treasurer of the city of Phladelphia is currently in jail for accepting illegal payments in exchange for giving city bond business and other contracts to selected companies. CDR and Image appeared frequently in the indictments, and CDR was found to have paid for the Treasurer’s trip to the Super Bowl, but neither firm was formally charged.
…The exact mechanism or mechanisms by which these scams works remains a bit obscure, and may vary from case to case. But the broad picture is clear: financial firms, including some Wall Street powerhouses (at least until recently) are suspected of colluding to rip off state and local governments — that is, taxpayers — for billions.
Contributions from CDR Financial Products and its owner to Gov. Bill Richardson have grabbed the most headlines in recent days. But a new report (pdf) from the National Institute on Money in State Politics shows that CDR and owner David Rubin have spread the money around, giving another $91,000 to Democratic elected officeholders and party officials in six other states in the last few years.
The report doesn’t count the $100,000 that CDR and Rubin gave to two political action committees that Richardson started and that figure in a federal probe that cost him a Cabinet post. It only shows the $20,000 that CDR and Rubin gave to Richardson for his 2006 re-election campaign, and $10,000 that was given to Lt. Gov. Diane Denish.
Some More Odds And Ends …
… are emerging about CDR Financial Products boss David Rubin, the business he’s done in Pennsylvania, and the politicians and causes he’s chosen to support:
In May 2005, Rubin made a $10,000 donation to the Philadelphia Future PAC, whose treasurer is David L. Cohen, the Comcast Corp. exec and longtime friend-of-Ed Rendell.
In 2000, Rubin also donated $2,500 to state Sen. Vince Fumo.
And in 2002 and 2003, he donated at least $10,000 to former Philly Mayor John F. Street, campaign finance records showed.
Customers of Philadelphia Gas Works will pay $60 million to bail the company out of a financial deal gone sour and to bolster an overall bleak financial condition.
Beginning Jan. 1, PGW customers began paying 5.2 percent more to heat their homes. That increase wiped out most of the benefits of a temporary 9.4 percent rate cut PGW had provided, as required by the state, because it was paying less for natural gas.
This means that while utility companies across the Northeast slash rates, customers of the city-owned PGW are seeing little benefit.
PGW may pay as much as $30 million of the $60 million to escape a complicated transaction called an interest-rate swap. The deal was arranged in part by CDR Financial Products, the company at the center of the federal pay-to-play investigation of Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico.
CDR, headquartered in Beverly Hills, became known to Philadelphians in 2004 when its name surfaced in a City Hall corruption scandal involving lawyer Ronald A. White and Corey Kemp, the city’s treasurer at the time. Kemp is serving a 10-year prison term for his involvement; White died before he could be tried. CDR was never charged in the case and continued to do work for the city.
The plummeting economic climate has roiled financial transactions entered into by many states, counties and cities. Baltimore, joined by the cities of Oakland and Fresno, the state of Mississippi, and others, is suing a number of banks and financial advisers. The suit alleges the brokers and banks conspired to fix prices of derivatives by bid-rigging. The case springs from a lengthy ongoing investigation by three federal agencies into municipal derivatives.
CDR and the bankers in the PGW deal, JPMorgan Chase & Co., are included in the Baltimore suit. JPMorgan declined to comment on the lawsuit. CDR maintains it has always acted ethically.
PGW and Philadelphia have not blamed CDR or JPMorgan for their investment problems.
CDR said it was only one of several advisers on the PGW deal and blamed the bad outcome on the economy.
You won’t find it in his memoir or any of the oodles of words written about him during the campaign, but this reporter has discovered a strikingly naive article Barack Obama wrote about the anti-war movement as a Columbia University senior in 1983.
If Obama still has this sensibility, he could be poised to take American foreign policy sharply to the left, notwithstanding the centrist foreign policy team he has assembled. Moreover, since Obama didn’t recognize the Soviet menace during the Cold War and blamed the possibility of war entirely on the United States, there’s good reason to think that today he could lack the moral clarity needed to fight radical Islam.
The article, “Breaking the War Mentality,” published by the Columbia magazine Sundial, is a wholesale endorsement of all sorts of leftist claptrap fashionable at the time.
Obama deems the Reagan era defense buildup a “distorted priority” and “dead end track.” Writing in the midst of the Cold War, Obama was nevertheless oblivious to the threat the Soviet Union then posed to the United States. Indeed, he does not even mention the Soviet Union in his article. Instead, Obama blames — you guessed it — America and its “twisted” world view for the “growing threat of war.”
If only Americans would change their thinking, he argues, the threat would subside. Give re-education a chance.
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
