This isn’t a town hall meet­ing on Parks and Recreation, but it feels a lot like one.

- Hunter (on the mis­han­dling of the “Delta hates Jews” PR mess)

I’m glad the man and his potty mouth have returned to reg­u­lar writing.

For the past sev­eral days, there’s been a lot of chat­ter on the inter­webs about a sug­ges­tion (which seems to have really taken off with this HuffPost arti­cle by Rabbi Jason Miller) that peo­ple boy­cott put pres­sure on Delta because “Delta will add Saudi Arabian Airlines to its SkyTeam Alliance of part­ner­ing com­pa­nies and would require Delta to ban Jews and hold­ers of Israeli pass­ports from board­ing flights to Saudi Arabia.” My col­leagues on UPGRD​.com, Matthew and Hunter, have offered thought­ful and thor­ough responses, as have pod­cast con­trib­u­tors Ben and Gary. Normally, I’d stay out of this to avoid the redun­dancy. But since I’m in the unique posi­tion of being an occa­sional UPGRD con­trib­u­tor and also some­one who works pro­fes­sion­ally in the Jewish com­mu­nity, I felt like I should jump in. Below is the first of two posts on the topic, both of which are cross-posted on my UPGRD​.com blog and on my per­sonal blog.

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A designer knows he has achieved per­fec­tion not when there is noth­ing more to add, but when there is noth­ing left to take away.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, on his 111th birthday
(orig­i­nally via Carmine Gallo)

Arash Markazi sums up how a lot of us feel:

I know the ter­ri­ble thing that hap­pened to Brian Stow on open­ing day, I know what’s hap­pen­ing on the field, I know what’s not hap­pen­ing in the stands. And I know what’s hap­pen­ing in the court­room. I know all this but I still go to the games because real­ity has always found a way of sus­pend­ing itself when I’m at the sta­dium. I still have the same feel­ing enter­ing the park­ing lot off Sunset Boulevard I did when I was a child with my father…

…Feelings such as that are deep-rooted. I’ve loved the Dodgers for as long as I can remem­ber. It’s a fan­dom that was passed on to me by my father, and I’m not about to throw it away now over a time period I hope to tell my kids about when I take them to Dodger Stadium some day. That’s why I can’t allow McCourt to change my feel­ings about the Dodgers and why I refuse to let him chase me away from a place that has given me so much joy over the years.

There is noth­ing com­pli­cated or con­flicted about my feel­ings for McCourt. I don’t like him, what he’s done. It doesn’t take me very long to come to this con­clu­sion and move on with my life. The truth is I don’t even think about him when I’m at Dodger Stadium. Even when I’m sit­ting in an almost-empty sec­tion of the sta­dium. He is the fur­thest thing from my mind as I watch the game with a Dodger Dog in my hands and Vin Scully in my ears. Maybe I’m cling­ing to mem­o­ries that will never be recap­tured and set­ting myself up for more heart­break but I can’t help it.

The Dodgers and Dodger Stadium still rep­re­sent some­thing spe­cial to me, some­thing more impor­tant than court cases, divorce set­tle­ments and los­ing streaks. Judging from the empty seats around me, this puts me in the minor­ity. But I can live with that. I’ve lived with this team all my life.

Amen.

In light of the Weiner scan­dal, Jeffrey Goldberg com­ments on Jewish women:

I’m not going near the ques­tion of what Jewish women do or don’t do in bed, but suf­fice it to say that Jewish women are ter­ri­bly, and con­tra­dic­to­rily, stereo­typed by soci­ety, and, often, by Jewish men them­selves. Either they’re dark, hot-blooded sluts (a com­mon Wasps fan­tasy, by the way — some of my best friends are Wasps with Jewish women-fix­a­tions) or they are, as Weiner would have it, the frozen cho­sen. The truth, of course, is that all women are dif­fer­ent, but I’ve noticed a cou­ple of things over the years: 1) A great num­ber of Jewish women pos­sess an irre­sistible com­bi­na­tion of sex­i­ness, intel­li­gence, ambi­tion, and a deep capac­ity for love; and 2) Many Jewish men, the less manly-men, in par­tic­u­lar, are intim­i­dated by these super­star Jewish women…

…I know this sounds as if I’m adver­tis­ing for a Jewish woman, but, thanks to the great philo-Semite Malcolm Gladwell, I found the best one, thank you very much.

Jeez.

Seeing as he and I both man­aged to over­come our eth­nic pre­dis­po­si­tion to being intim­i­dated by strong Jewesses (in other words, I get where he’s com­ing from, I guess), it sounds to me like he’s brag­ging. (“Congressman Weiner rep­re­sents a cliché stereo­type, but check me out. I can han­dle the Jewish ladies.”)

(cross posted to my upgrd​.com blog)

A part of me wants to write a long post ana­lyz­ing the prob­lems with CNNMoney’s “Best Frequent Flyer Programs.” I’m really tempted to go point-by-point in order to illus­trate just how stu­pid their rank­ings are. Their cri­te­ria are incon­sis­tent, their expla­na­tions for why cer­tain pro­grams are best ignore the fact that other air­lines offer sim­i­lar (or even bet­ter) perks, and they totally ignore the fact that the pro­grams avail­able from domes­tic-only* dis­count car­ri­ers don’t allow for inter­na­tional and pre­mium-class redemption.

But truth be told, I’m actu­ally thank­ful for arti­cles like CNNMoney’s. For those of us who actu­ally want to get the most out of our miles — namely inter­na­tional pre­mium-class awards — it’s prob­a­bly bet­ter if peo­ple blow their miles on crappy domes­tic coach tick­ets. Sure… it breaks my heart that poor saps who don’t know bet­ter are blow­ing valu­able miles on tick­ets they prob­a­bly could buy out-of-pocket when they could be using the same amount (or just a bit more) to fly in lux­ury to exotic locales. But with a lim­ited quan­tity of high-value redemp­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties, I’m just as happy to have less com­pe­ti­tion for the seats. Every busi­ness trav­eler who insists on fly­ing Southwest (even though he could get bet­ter élite ben­e­fits and could use the miles to take bet­ter vaca­tions if he flew United or American or what­ever) is one less per­son I have to com­pete with for an upgrade, one less per­son to snap up that first class seat to Europe before me, one less per­son in the élite line at the airport.

(And I’ll ven­ture a guess that if every­one used fre­quent flyer pro­grams to their full poten­tial,  those pro­grams would stop being so lucra­tive for the air­lines and great redemp­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties would get rarer.)

So sure… Southwest, Virgin America, and Jetblue have excel­lent FF pro­grams. Sign up now. Fly those air­lines exclu­sively. Enjoy your “A‑list” sta­tus and your free coach flights from Oakland to Boise.

* Yes, I know that some of the “domes­tic-only” dis­count car­ri­ers fly to a hand­ful of loca­tions in Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean. Whatever.

Amy Pohler at Harvard’s graduation:

As you nav­i­gate through the rest of your life, be open to col­lab­o­ra­tion. Other peo­ple and other people’s ideas are often bet­ter than your own. Find a group of peo­ple who chal­lenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life. No one is here today because they did it on their own…You’re all here today because some­one gave you strength. Helped you. Held you in the palm of their hand. God, Allah, Buddha, Gaga—whomever you pray to.

(the video of the whole speech)

Doug Mataconis on Scott Walker’s move to end a pro­gram that allows gay cou­ples hos­pi­tal vis­i­ta­tion rights (or, to be more spe­cific, his attempt to stop defend­ing the laws of his state and the rights of his cit­i­zens in court against extrem­ist anti-gay hate groups):

I really have to won­der what kind of per­son would seek to pre­vent two peo­ple who are in a rela­tion­ship from mak­ing what­ever arrange­ments they want to allow the other to visit them in the hos­pi­tal, and what right the state has to tell hos­pi­tals that they can­not honor those requests.

Is the GOP hatred for gays so per­va­sive that they could really be this cold and heartless?

Yup. Apparently, it is.

Or as Jed Lewison puts it:

Gee, gay-bash­ing is just so fis­cal con­ser­v­a­tive, isn’t it?

From Dahlia Lithwick’s excel­lent d’var torah arti­cle, “The Fifth Passover Question: Who’s going to lead the Seder?”

Passover is really the only Jewish hol­i­day in which most house­holds tap some layper­son to be pro­fes­sional clergy for a night, and—as my friend Lisa observed yesterday—it’s thus apt that this hol­i­day cel­e­brates one of the most reluc­tant lead­ers in all of bib­li­cal his­tory. Here is poor Moses, beg­ging to be relieved of the respon­si­bil­ity of Sherpa-ing his peo­ple from one dusty place to another—pleading unfit­ness, a speech imped­i­ment, and the absence of mean­ing­ful lead­er­ship qual­i­ties. And here we all are, thou­sands of years later, plead­ing unfit­ness, per­for­mance anx­i­ety, and the absence of mean­ing­ful lead­er­ship qualities.

Stop me if this is start­ing to sound familiar.

Maybe the real les­son of Passover is that nobody—in any generation—feels fit to lead a bunch of other peo­ple, but they do it any­way, because in the end some­body has to. Maybe it’s not just the story of the Exodus we are pass­ing down from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion, but the trick of lead­ing, when all you ever wanted to do was follow.

Hmm.