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Howard Stern takes on Oprah and Gabourey Sidibe: "Oprah is another liar, a filthy liar . . ."

Psychic charged with investor fraud: "He should have seen this coming"

Chelsea Clinton marriage: converting to Judaism?

The government runs America? Senator Al Franken begs for infrastructure, courtesy of Google

SOUL'S CODE — When Freud coined the term, transference, he used it to describe the unconscious projection we have about a parent, or some other childhood figure, onto a lover, boss — or, hell, in the media age — a presidential candidate.

Is Barack Obama the Son of Promise, Child of Hope (left) and collective father figure, savior and redeemer of us — as in, the U.S.?

We rejoice in his victory by documenting the Top 10 similarities and synchronicities between the president-elect and Jesus the Redeemer:

10. Jesus urged his fellow Jews to pay their taxes ("Render unto Ceasar, the things which are Ceasar's"). Obama plans to make Jews who are wealthy pay higher taxes.

9. Jesus was a vegan who didn't do drugs or smoke. While campaigning for president, Obama quit smoking — and continued to eat arugala, at least off-camera.

8. In 1987, William Mosley wrote a famous book arguing that Jesus was black. Way before then, Obama was black. (Highschool basketball team photo, Punahou School, Hawaii, 1977).

7. Jesus Christ and Barack Obama both share the same middle initial: "H."

6. The Romans thought Jesus was a rebel and a radical. The Republicans think that Obama is a radical, Al-Qaeda double-agent and secret member of the Wobblies.

5. Obama dressed up in funny-looking, Middle Eastern-type robes. According to church paintings and Sunday school coloring books, that's all Jesus ever wore.

4. Jesus lived and died seven centuries before the creation of Islam. Obama is not now, nor has he ever been, a Muslim.

3. Saint John the Baptist said a messiah was coming, and baptized Jesus as the one. In a summer 2008 TV ad the McCain campaign declared, "Barack Obama may be The One".

2. Both Jesus and Obama got their values from their mothers, who at various Kodak Moments were single-moms. As for deadbeat-daddy issues, let's not even go there.

And the Number 1 reason that Barack Obama and Jesus are, for all intents and purposes, practically the same person:

They both hung out with some dodgy peeps, pharisees, prostitutes and revolutionaries — and that's just Obama . . .

BY PAUL KAIHLA —  John McCain argued that Barack Obama's reading of blue-collar voters in Pennsylvannia is "elitist," and represents a “fundamental contradiction of what I believe America’s all about.”

At the umpteenth Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton said Obama is “elitist, out of touch and, frankly, patronizing.”

In the argot of public relations firms, those were killer 'key messages' to put Obama in a reactive mode for his candor at a San Francisco fundraiser on April 6 (listen to the recording). But if you pull the camera back for a moment, Obama's take on Reagan Democrats who go right-wing on social issues exquisitely mirrors the received wisdom among leading figures in transpersonal psychology and the spiritual self-help movement.

As Obama was tipping off a campaign volunteer about the mood on the street before she parachuted into Pennsylvannia ahead of the state's April 22 primary, here is his "bitter" quote:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy to people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations.

The economist Richard Florida has brilliantly broken down the U.S. labor market into three broad tiers: blue-collar, service-sector and so-called "creative class" workers. The latter are the engineers, scientists, media types, artists, teachers and healers who occupy roughly the top third of America's 140-million-strong workforce.

Some of you will see this as a stretch but you can make an analogy between the have and have-nots in the labor market, and the hierarchy represented by the human chakra system.

Indian and Chinese models of spirituality and medicine have long held that we are essentially electro-magnetic beings, and Hindu tradition in particular correlates our biology and biography to energy centers in the spine located at major branchings of the human nervous system, beginning at the base of the spinal column and moving upward to the top of the skull.

A notion among many depth-psychology therapists and followers of mysticism is that frustrated, downwardly-mobile workers (along with megalo-millionaire Larry Ellison types) are stuck in their 1st and 2nd chakras -- the 'energy anatomy' rooted in survival and sexuality -- and attendant emotions of fear, anger, jealousy, and material fixation.

Lord knows, we all channel that shadow stuff. But the second leg of the argument goes that creative class types -- whether they're software writers at Apple in Cupertino, CA or a music professor at a university in Boston -- have had more success (and interest) in opening up their higher chakras, especially the ones associated with intellectual awareness, imagination and inspiration.

Caroline Myss, the author of a cross-over hit called Sacred Contracts, is fun to hear on this tipping point in personal growth. Her starting point: people who seek a safety net in tribal structures like family, a company, or a community are unconsciously leaching their personal power -- or in this site's language, planting bugs in their individual soul's code. The reason: those traditional tribes can no longer uphold their end of the contract . . .

If I asked you, 'What tribal rules are you plugged into?' Could you answer me? Have you ever even thought about it? Your first chakra requires that you plug yourself into a tribal structure that nurtures you, that you feel safe in. We are essentially communcal creatures . . .

Your first chakra is your expression of whether you expect society to be there to take care of you. Your personality can say, 'No, I don't'. But if I sat down with you and said, 'Oh ya? What do you expect from your boss? What do you expect from a place that you work for?' . . .

Whether its General Motors, Dupont or little companies, the universal phenomenon that's going on is that no tribal system is able to take care of its own. The tribal archetype is changing.

Isn't that the vibe that Obama is picking up in the rust-belt? The more that 'have-not' tribes are challenged by a labor market that's no longer local but global, the more people who operate out of a lower-chakra consciousness are programmed to go to a rearguard group-hug around in-your-face tropes like guns and bible-thumping.

We all know an Ex who acts out an F-You attitude because he or she thinks they've been robbed, and the world owes them a favor. A victim identity is low-chakra, the visionary identity resides in the 5th and 6th Myss again:

The thought, 'We create our own reality' stands in direct opposition to the perception of the victim. What being a victim gives you permission to do is engage in self-pity, and blame others for your circumstances.

As the economist Florida says, Obama is the candidate of America's "Have" workers because he's a conduit for the aspirations of the creative class. Just because he dared to point out a psycho-dynamic among "have-nots" isn't a proof that he's more patronizing than sympathizing. Rather than being "out of touch," as both Obama's Democratic and Republican accusers claim, he seems to be multi-dimensionally in touch.

BY PAUL KAIHLA — Eliott Spitzer made a national reputation as a crime-busting reformer in the mold of Prohibition-era FBI agents like Eliott Ness, a.k.a. the "Untouchables." But today, the New York Governor was caught in a wiretap of a high-class hooker syndicate.

Spitzer is urbane, witty, and he had credible presidential aspirations. He also happens to have a wife of 21 years (woman on left), and three teenaged kids. But just like San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom's adultery scandal last year, Spitzer suffered from a condition called "splitting off." He partitioned his Self into a public personality, and a darkly-different secret one that he was probably in denial about. But it couldn't elude the scientific precision of electronic surveillance:

After obtaining authorization to tap the club’s phones, federal agents recorded more than 5,000 calls and text messages and had access to 6,000 e-mail messages, court papers said. Many of these were somewhat mundane requests for appointments . . . the case was investigated by the Internal Revenue Service and the F.B.I.

In an election cycle where Republicans like Senator Larry Craig have supplied most of the sex scandals, Spitzer's fall from grace will have national implications for the Democrats. It will remind voters of the Clintons' contribution to the stereotype of liberal hedonism, and make Barack Obama's model marriage and puritan lifestyle all the more appealing.

BY PAUL KAIHLA — There is a crisis in America. That crisis is divorce. It is easier to get out of a marriage than (to get out of a) contract to buy a used car.
- Mike Huckabee

Another governor of Arkansas is always running for president — this time, a Republican. Incredibly, Mike Huckabee was even born in the same small town as Bill Clinton (Hope, Ark.). And Huckabee also has a marriage problem, although his isn't personal. It's policy.

A Baptist pastor, Huckabee became a minor political celeb last year when he released a book, Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork, which chronicled his journey losing more than 100 pounds during his second term as governor of one of the high-fat states in America.

But long before that he became a darling of the evangelical right. Not for writing stuff like this:

I’m a conservative, pro-life, pro-family evangelical who believes in God, lower taxes, less government, personal empowerment, personal ownerhip and personal responsibility.… I have a simple philosophy – we need to take God more seriously and ourselves less seriously.

But for championing what's called covenant marriage, a principle he passed into law in Arkansas in 2001 that forces couples to seek counseling before getting a divorce and eliminates the "no-fault" provision for divorce. In an Arkansas covenant marriage, a judge will only grant a divorce if issues like impotence, abuse, adultery, or addiction "to habitual drunkenness for one (1) year" plagued a marriage.

So Huckabee's answer to America's divorce epidemic is to make it harder to get divorced. But he's got it backwards.

The problem isn't that it's easier to get out of a marriage than a car purchase agreement. The real issue is that it's way easier to get into a marriage in America, than it is to get out of one.

It ought to be the reverse: it should be way harder to get a marriage licence in the first place than it is to get divorced. The barriers to entry should be at the beginning, not the end.

To go back to the car analogy, how strange is it that we have to pass a competency test in both theoretical knowledge and practical road skills to get permission from the state to drive a car? Yet the only hurdle to joining a live human being in a lifelong sacred contract is a line-up at city hall and a nominal fee.

It's not as if the federal government hasn't already developed intricate measures for what it thinks constitutes a marriage with merit, they're just isolated for very special cases. Try marrying a foreigner and sponsoring him or her for a green card, and see what the Department of Homeland Security says

We're simply noting the irony here -- not advocating a revitalization of marriage through the machinery of government or legislation. We at Soul's Code are all about change from within.

Huckabee's covenant marriage isn't just wrong in utility, it's totally tone-deaf in a disposable consumer society where half of all first marriages are discarded, and 60 percent of re-marriages fail. Especially in election season. Where is it positioned on his campaign website ?

If Huckabee actually won the nomination and became the Republican candidate, it would be a gift to a Democrat like Hillary. Her campaign would haul out Huckabee's past advocacy of covenant marriage and nuke him with the equivalent of a Daisy commercial depicting covenant marriage as an Abu Ghraib for all women, a new form of prison reinforced by the lack of female parity in earning power.