As the Democratic primaries roll on and the fight for the nomination between Hillary and Barack becomes more strident, many people are rightfully worried about how the negative turn in the primaries may affect the eventual Democratic chances for winning the White House this coming Fall. I share some of that worry, but I also feel that the primaries are an important time to test the qualities of both Hillary and Obama to know if they have the political savvy to counter political attacks and push their message through to the American people. Other worthy Presidential candidates over the past 30 years have floundered because they did not have the political savvy to overcome sudden political crisis and controversies that drowned out their messages, intelligent and otherwise capable candidates like Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, Al Gore, Jesse Jackson, and Joe Biden.

A few months ago political cartoonist Clay Bennett had an amicable parting with the Christian Science Monitor. It's sad for me, because I really liked his cartoons. They're very insightful of the political scene, but they're not mean spirited as some of the more incisive satirists like Ralph Steadman or Pat Oliphant could be. He uses computer graphics to create these simple images with empathetic characters, and he has a way to bring forth his message in an easy and direct way. One of my chief interests is finding artists who comment on politics and religion and society.

Some of the best social commentators right now are the political cartoonists. In its farewell editorial, the editors of the Christian Science Monitor wrote, " It is committed to the journalistic tradition that a visual statement about something in the news can, in a glance, capture the essence of a theme - and sometimes two themes at once. Cartoons, by their humor, help stimulate thought and discussion over ideas."

One day, about a year ago, I was busy doing my usual work of processing books in the library where I work. As I was going through the books, I spied a cover that caught my interest. The cover was a sepia picture of an older woman staring straight ahead at the reader, in a backyard with a crow to the right of her foot. The book was titled The Collected Stories and it was by an author that I had never heard before. They say a person should never judge a book by its cover, but I became interested in reading Grace Paley’s stories because of that cover. I found a remarkable writer of the lives of working class families.

A few months ago I listened to a Books-On-CD by Cynthia Lennon on her former husband John Lennon. It's a fascinating book for me. She doesn't see the Beatles as I do, like a fan. She knew them before the fame, and can see them in more human terms. A lot of what she said surprised me about the dynamics of the Beatles. According to her, John socialized most with Ringo, because Ringo was so laid back and funny. John's best friend was Paul, but it was a complex relationship. The two of them spent so much time writing songs, and it was such a pressure situation, that they needed time apart after writing a few songs. So John and Paul socialized relatively little. John's relationship with George was like that of an older brother/younger brother relationship. John was fond of George, but was also annoyed at him a bit. The four were very close until around 1968, when the fabric of their friendship started to slowly unravel. John was very affected by the loss of his mother. The loss of his mom gave him a protective shell. And he was always trying to please his Aunt Mimi.

Two months ago in the Bay Area, Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman's documentary Nanking played in theaters in the Bay Area. Featured in the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, it chronicled the invasion by the Imperial Japanese Army of the city Nanking in December 1937 and the devastation that the Japanese Army wrecked upon the Chinese inhabitants. In the official website here the film is summarized as such:

"By November 12th, Shanghai had fallen and by December 13th, the Japanese had defeated the defending Chinese army and invaded the city of Nanking.

The events now known as ‘the rape of Nanking’ lasted approximately six weeks. The city was looted and burned, and marauding Japanese soldiers unleashed a staggering wave of violence on Nanking’s population. According to the summary judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East – also known as the Tokyo Trials, 'estimates indicate that the total number of civilians and prisoners of war murdered in Nanking and its vicinity during the first six weeks of the Japanese occupation was over 200,000. Approximately 20,000 cases of rape occurred in the city during the first month of the occupation."

As a big movie fan, I always get annoyed at people who say that movies are only a bad influence on people. In my head, I keep wanting to tell them that they just watch the wrong movies.

One of the movies that really influenced me was Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List".

It not only gave me a real sense of the horrors of the Holocaust, it got me interested in the idea of the difference a courageous individual can have to the people he or she comes in contact with.

At around the mid 1990s, I got interested in learning more about other rescuers and hearing how they got the courage and the values to risk their lives for those who were despised by the general public.