Joshua Stein

As I sit at my desk, a bug flutters by. It and its family share my home, adding little but some small annoyance. Each bug is about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Yes, that dot, or maybe smaller. They seem to waft like a slow-motion knuckleball, though still too swift in their gyrations for me to catch them (except when I do!) and, once trapped, they are easily killed.

Joshua SteinLast Thursday morning as I lay in bed looking at the rain coming steadily down on the windowpane, I thought of Mitt. He’s narrowing the gap. Good for him. In Iowa, a full 75 percent of the Republican voters chose someone else, but in New Hampshire, it was only 63 percent.

Joshua Stein

The story is by now familiar enough to make grown men gag in disgust. In Israel, the haredi, the ultra-Orthodox (as opposed to the merely “Orthodox” who are called dati) have raised their voices and thrown their excrement. One dati woman dared to sit in the front section of a public bus and was abused by haredi passengers. Students who attend an all-girls school set up by dati parents near a haredi neighborhood in Beit Shemesh have to run a gauntlet to get to class.

Joshua Stein

There are times when the truth hurts – not the subject of the statement but the maker of it. Two recent examples, one from a Republican, the other from a Democrat.