Monday morning.

* Following up on this post from Sunday: Rahm Emanuel says there will be no Bush-era prosecutions. OpenLeft wants to know whether Eric Holder is "a Gonzales-like lackey" in light of his apparent willingness to allow political judgments to influence DoJ policy.

* And speaking of political judgments influencing DoJ policy, this Rep. Harman story is pretty unbelievable, even for the Bush administration.

There are a lot of hairy details on this one. But the gist is that an NSA wiretap recorded Harman in a conversation with a "suspected Israeli agent" in which Harman allegedly agreed to use her influence with the DOJ to get them to drop the AIPAC spy case in exchange for help lobbying then-Speaker-in-waiting Nancy Pelosi to make Harman chair of the House Intelligence Committee -- a position she ended up not getting.

...

The story suggests that the tapes show Harman crossed the line. And the gears were in motion to open a full blown investigation. But then Alberto Gonzales intervened and shutdown the whole thing.

Why? Here's where it gets into the realm of bad novel writing: because Gonzales (and the White House) needed Harman to go to bat for them on the warrantless wiretaping story that the New York Times was then on the brink of publishing.

Find me one honest Congressperson.

* The Hollywood Reporter says the chances of a Dollhouse renewal are 50/50. That's actually a lot better than I thought.

* Tuna projected to be wiped out by 2012.

* Maps from the recession.

Please do allow me to deliver one very personal message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall: rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this:

"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."

Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

Haruki Murakami accepts the Jerusalem Prize in Israel. Seconding Black Garterbelt: Give this man a Nobel already.

I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called the System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong -- and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others' souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.

Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow the System to exploit us. We must not allow the System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made the System. That is all I have to say to you.

Malcolm Gladwell gets a smackdown from The Morning News. Whedon says more Dr. Horrible on the way. What happens when a space elevator breaks. How exactly it was you came to fall in love with the majesty of colors. 3-D representations of 2-D video games. Scenes from Gaza. Bush White House precisely as dickish as originally thought.

Sometimes I get the impression the right-wing doesn't take the world very seriously.

Joe The Plumber is putting down his wrenches and picking up a reporter's notebook.

The Ohio man who became a household name during the presidential campaign says he is heading to Israel as a war correspondent for the conservative Web site pjtv.com.

I'm sure there's something about this is not totally ridiculous.

He tells WNWO-TV in Toledo that he wants to let Israel's '''Average Joes' share their story.''

Aha, of course! Now it all makes sense.

Will Obama's rhetoric on civilian casualties in Palestine have any bite?

The clash of civilizations is finally over: Samuel Huntington has died.

'God's Wife': excerpt from a NOVA story on the "Bible's buried secrets" dealing with Asherah, whom the ancient Israelites considered the wife of YHWH. From the second link:

Rachael Kohn: Now something must have happened which radically removes Mrs God from the scene.

Diana Edelman: Yes, Mrs God was obviously quite popular, well I think what happened really was the development of monotheism. In the period when Judah and Israel were States, we had a national religion which is perhaps best called Yahwehism and in that we had the divine couple, Yahweh and Asherah, and there we other gods, below them. We have mentioned in the Bible pestilence and plague, we have sun, we have moon, we may have Lady Wisdom, if she’s not Asherah reincarnate, so we had a range of deities. And in that set-up, the male god not only is judge of the earth, and in charge of the created order, but he’s in charge of the fertility of the crops and the fertility of the animals. It’s his wife who is particularly responsible for human fertility. And we find this set-up throughout the ancient Near East. As a matter of fact, if Israel and Judah hadn’t had it, they would have really been the oddballs.

But Israel, well Israel ceased to be in 721 BC, Judah continued that religion. When it was sent into exile there was a change, and it’s when they come back from exile that it seems that Mrs God has been ousted. She’s no longer welcome in the Pantheon. And it’s when we get the new Temple rebuilt in Jerusalem the traditional date for that is given under Darius about 515 BCE.

We have all sorts of funny things in that new Temple. No.1, we don’t have The Ark any more. The primary symbol of Yahweh when he used to be the God of Judah, was the Ark, which seems to have been tied up with the title Yahweh of the Hosts, showing him a very martial God; that symbol is gone. Now it’s not like they couldn’t have had that symbol in the Temple. They could have easily rebuilt an Ark. So what we’re seeing here is a change in the understanding of God and God’s function. Yahweh is being depicted in a new way. He’s no longer just the God of Judah, he is a universal God who controls all of history. He isn’t a warrior God any more because he doesn’t have a particular nation he can be warrior God of any more. Even though we’ll have language that he is going to go out and suppress the nations himself, we find this in some of the prophetic language, even from his late period.

Along with this change though, we no longer have a wife. Asherah is gone, probably the other Gods in the Pantheon as well are all becoming absorbed into this deity whose name used to be Yahweh Sebaot, but now he’s become Yahweh Elohim, the Goddest of the Gods.

Some of the best posts this weekend were from Josh Marshall, expressing outrage over the baseless attacks on Rashid Khalidi for no reason other than the fact that he is Palestinian:

The McCain campaign has been throwing around so much mud and smears in recent weeks that it's easy to miss just how ugly and shameful their character assassination of Rashid Khalidi is. This is an entirely respectable, highly respected scholar. To go further into making a case for him would only be to enable and indulge McCain's sordid appeal to racism. For McCain, personally, to compare Khalidi to a neo-nazi, it's just an offense McCain should never be forgiven for. It's right down in the gutter with Joe McCarthy and the worst of the worst. Khalidi is in this new McCain set piece for one reason -- as a generic Arab, to spur the idea that Obama is foreign, friendly with terrorists and possibly Muslim.