Weekend Update - Empathy Edition

• Arthur starts our weekend: "I heard this guy on NPR today on 'Science Friday.' Fascinating stuff. He spoke about empathy as being something seen in animals, obeying some of the same characteristics we see in humans, where those seen as most similar to us are responded to, while those increasingly less like us are far less valued or taken into consideration. Something I have obsessed about for years. The author called out Senator Kyl for saying that he personally didn't need maternity care, so why should the government pay for it? Why indeed, since Kyl doubtless was hatched from a lizard's egg.


• You know how those staircases are getting longer, and the arthritis and the colon cancer is getting worse? We feel for you. Yes, we here at the Coca-Cola Company feel your pain. Or rather, we don't, actually, but we like to say we do in marketing copy, because it makes us sound beneficent and honest, like a good corporate citizen, when in fact we're all about figuring out sinister ways to keep you wildly addicted to as many of our products for as long as humanly possible -- which, if you drink enough of them, won't be that long at all. Mark Morford empathizes.


• And we can certainly feel for that little boy who kept throwing up everytime he was supposed to lie on camera. We can be empathetic and morally superior at the same time. No matter what our own faults as parents, we could never top Richard Heene, who mercilessly exploited his child for fame and profit. Nor could we ever be as craven as the news media, especially cable television, which dumped a live broadcast of President Obama in New Orleans to track the supersized Jiffy Pop bag floating over Colorado. Frank Rich comments.


• Now this one's going to be difficult. Let's see, how could we feel empathy for Rush Limbaugh? How 'bout, it must be really tiring carrying around all that bullshit in one golf shirt. Hey, really, we care.


• John Hagee teaches "theological racism," the idea that the destiny of peoples is based on their biblical genealogy. Hagee claims Jewish souls are different from those of gentiles and that, according to divine plan, Jews have no right to live anywhere on Earth but in Israel. Hagee's fellow Christian Zionists predict that a coming, divinely ordained paroxysm of anti-Semitic violence, a "second Holocaust," will be necessary to force all Jews to make aliyah. So why is Elie Wiesel supporting events sponsored by John Hagee's Christians United for Israel? An open letter to Wiesel from Rachel Tabachnick.


• We all feel other people's pain from time to time, it's only human. That is, except for some people: About 300 protesters outside a downtown hotel blew plastic horns, tossed shoes and burned George W. Bush in effigy Thursday as the former U.S. president spoke to a luncheon of the Montreal Board of Trade. Darn those Canadians. (tee hee)