Palin’s progress

Carlsbad-based self-help guru Deepak Chopra is reportedly getting paid big bucks to appear in a new series of commercials for Microsoft that attempt to rebut those long-running Apple “I’m a PC and I’m a Mac” spots making fun of Windows, in which Justin Long and John Hodgman play the Mac and PC characters. In Microsoft’s comeback, Chopra is seated in an easy chair behind a desk with a wall of books in back of him and says, “I’m a PC and a human being. Not a human doing. Not a human thinking. A human being.”

Helping to recast Microsoft’s image isn’t Chopra’s only cause these days. He recently dispatched an email to his fans attacking Alaska governor Sarah Palin, the GOP’s vice presidential nominee: “Palin reinforces the overall message of the reactionary right, which has been in play since 1980, that social justice is liberal-radical, that minorities and immigrants, being different from ‘us’ pure American types, can be ignored, that progressivism takes too much effort and globalism is a foreign threat.” In reference to Palin, he continued, “She can add mom to apple pie on her résumé, while blithely reversing forty years of feminist progress.” In March 2000, a superior court jury rejected a claim by Joyce Weaver that Chopra fired her from her seminar-organizing job in 1995 after she alleged he and a colleague had sexually harassed her. “I look at these people as hyenas after my blood and marrow just because they think I have money,” Chopra was quoted as saying at the time. Based on campaign-contribution records, Chopra was originally a Hillary Clinton backer, giving a total of $4600 in 2007. On July 28 of this year, he gave Barack Obama the same amount.