April 11, 2006 1000 PST (FTW) - ASHLAND -Cynthia McKinney is a friend of mine. Until the day I die she will be a friend of mine. More than that, she will be a role model and an inspiration that I don't ever expect to be equaled, let alone surpassed. Full disclosure.

Out of several dozen Op-Eds, news reports and commentaries on the now-infamous so-called "cop-slapping" event of March 29th, I haven't seen a single one that, from my perspective, got it right.

So right up front, let me say that if I am forced to look at this one snapshot incident, divorced from context and history, then yes, my very good friend messed up. It shouldn't have become as big a deal as it has and she bears some responsibility for that. But if I look at the event as part of a continuum of the life of congress, or the life of this nation, and (no less importantly) of the life of this woman, things look and feel a whole lot different.

The right to vote, as well as the principle of “one person, one vote,” are cornerstones of our democracy. The anti-slavery, women’s suffrage, and civil rights movements as well as the expansion of voting to young people are all part of the history of electoral reform in this country. Equally fundamental is the assurance that each voter knows that her or his vote counts and is counted as intended. At this time in our history, many have lost confidence in our voting system.

Weeks after a British magazine published a long article by two American professors titled “The Israel Lobby,” the outrage continued to howl through mainstream U.S. media.

A Los Angeles Times op-ed article by Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Max Boot helped to set a common tone. He condemned a working paper by professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that was excerpted in the London Review of Books.

The working paper, Boot proclaimed, is “nutty.” And he strongly implied that the two professors -- Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago and Walt at Harvard -- are anti-Semitic.

Many who went on the media attack did more than imply. On April 3, for instance, the same day that the Philadelphia Inquirer reprinted Boot’s piece from the L.A. Times, a notably similar op-ed appeared in the Boston Herald under the headline “Anti-Semitic Paranoia at Harvard.”

And so it goes in the national media echo chamber. When a Johns Hopkins University professor weighed in on the op-ed page of the Washington Post, the headline was blunt: “Yes, It’s Anti-Semitic.” The

HOLY COW!!!  Somebody emailed me the above captioned article and I have seldom been as entertained.  I have always wondered just how, in Christ's time, the Pharisees got things so twisted.  To heck with the Pharisees...we've got THE FREE PRESS.  You folks need to take a course in old fashioned logic.  I have never read such twisted diatribe in my life.

  Are you really serious???

Tsotsi: Written and directed by Gavin Hood, based on the book by Athol Fugard. Running time: 94 minutes.

Tsotsi, the recent Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Film, is currently playing at the Drexel East Theater. The film centers on a young hoodlum (Presley Chweneyagae) from the Soweto township of Johannesburg, South Africa. He goes by the name of “Tsotsi,” which is the local street slang for “thug.”