Politics and Culture

1. Obama said that the Fort Hood massacre is "incomprehensible." Let me help him: The killer thought that the God in which he believes would like that he murder those who, according to him this time, are harming Muslims. At least that's what he said. Understand?

2. I added on my Fort Hood post that it's true that if a person murders (unjust killing) for his religion, he's a religious fanatic. It follows, however, that a person who kills for material things, like money, is a materialist fanatic. The Orlando killer, Jason Rodriguez, is a materialist nut.

3. Brookstone should be able to fire people who don't agree with a strongly-held corporate belief. It's their money. I also think that corporations can make people speak politely or with a certain accent, have appropriate hair styles, not dress like the opposite sex, and pretty much anything else. It's their money.

4. And, why isn't the boss wrong for creating a hostile work environment for Christians?

5. Some people without strong feelings on gay marriage might be swayed against it by the sense that stating a negative opinion about homosexuality might get them in trouble and that allowing same-sex marriage would make it downright forbidden. Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage has said that the Carrie Prejean incident helped their cause. The pro-traditional-marriage-only side in the Maine vote used the case of a counselor who got in trouble for expressing an anti-same-sex marriage opinion as an example of what can happen to dissenters if gay marriage were allowed. The anti-Mormon demonstrations reinforced the idea that pro-same-sex marriage types will not tolerate dissent once they gain the power to impose their view of the world onto everybody else.

6. Man, I wish I didn't have to talk about this stuff.

Conservative bloggers, talk radio and cable show hosts, and columnists must be jealous of Obama's ability to convince people to be conservatives.

1. One theory concerning marriage fidelity matters is that one's personal conduct is a good predictor of one's public corruption factor. It may not be a completely 1:1 correlation, but I do think that dishonesty is a habit or: if one practices dishonesty, one finds it easy to lie. I'll add that the adept liar finds it difficult to tell the truth, if only because he's used to lying. When one practices honesty, telling the truth is easy and lying is hard. Wouldn't it be difficult to have two standards on the same sin, honesty (I have heard men say that it's OK to lie to women, but that's just a rationalization).

Mark Sanford's behavior dovetails nicely with this theory: personally and publicly corrupt, it turns out.

Other notoriously womanizing presidents- Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Clinton- were also corrupt politicians, if not unaccomplished in other areas. Carter was neither corrupt nor an adulterer, just foolish.

2. It's important that politicians be personally and publicly honest; not only do they handle our money, but they're a reflection of their electors, us (people get the government they deserve) and an example to children. I might not care whether my mechanic or surgeon is having an affair, as I can check their figures or get a second opinion. Skill and talent are independent of one's morality.

3. I wonder whether cheating doctors perform more unnecessary tonsillectomies.

4. It would be rude to ask Eunice Kennedy Shriver how much she's spending on her end-of-life health care. It's none of my business. It shouldn't be the government's either, which is why I want an independent health care system.

5. Isn't it hilarious when ultra-left Hollywood asks for tax breaks to stay in business?

6. Republicans did well with Sotomayor and are doing fine on health care. Their strategy seems to be to give Obama lots of rope to hang himself or, non-metaphorically: let Obama enact lots of liberal legislation and watch him fail. When you're confident in the dumminess of the other guy's ideology and the good sense of the American people, you can play this game.

7. Useful idiocy watch: Benicio del Toro and Bill Murray travel to Cuba. Like Henry from Babalu, I expect del Toro to be an idiot, but Bill Murray should know better.

1. Latinos are complaining about racial profiling as well. Hmmm. I wonder if there's a correlation between how much a group is profiled racially and how much crime that group is responsible for, proportionate to their numbers. Just a guess.

2. The problem with the clash for clunkers program isn't that it ran out of money; it's that it existed in the first place. All of these incentives have the same effect: instead of people making decisions based on their needs, they have to go through a rule book and see to see if they're doing exactly what the government wants them to. What if a family could have held on to a car for a year more? How's that good for the environment? What if they could have bought a cheaper, used car? Remember when Obama said that credit card companies encourage people to spend money they couldn't pay back? Well, isn't encouraging people to buy more expensive new cars the same thing? What about the poor people who could have bought that working car? Now what do they do: wait for another handout?

3. Forbes has the twenty most useful tools of all time. No mention of my favorite, the remote control.

4. Robert Gibbs said that the polls aren't important to Barack Obama:

“Look, the president doesn’t spend a whole lot of time focused on polling,” Gibbs said. “The president isn’t fixated on the ups and downs in polling. If we were, we’d have quit two years ago this summer, if ever even run for president.”

His pollster, on the other hand, says that his whole message is crafted by polls:

Benenson, who also served as Obama's pollster during the campaign, declined to discuss the administration's efforts, as did many other senior White House officials. But since the early days in office, Benenson and other top advisers to the president have gathered every Wednesday night to discuss their latest polling and how to use the results to advance their ambitious agenda.

One top adviser said, "I mean, I'm looking at polling, like, all the time."

Obama's decision to focus his public rhetoric on insurance companies has become more noticeable as the White House has sought buy-in from most of the other health-care groups, including doctors, nurses, hospitals, drug companies and AARP.

In remarks at a town hall in Shaker Heights, Ohio, on July 23, Obama vowed that his changes would "keep the insurance companies out of your health-care decisions." At a meeting of the American Medical Association, Obama told doctors that his ire against insurance companies comes from personal experience.

"I will never forget watching my own mother, as she fought cancer in her final days, worrying about whether her insurer would claim her illness was a preexisting condition so it could get out of providing coverage," Obama said.

Benenson is part of a team of survey experts who have been with Obama since the campaign. Paul Harstad, Benenson's partner, and David Binder, a San Francisco-based expert on focus groups, also continue to provide guidance to the president about public opinion.

5. Has there ever been a more brazenly dishonest presidential statement than:

"The teleprompter made me say it."

6. I mentioned that I didn't like Harry Potter, even after reading a bit of it, because felt a little too feminine for my tastes, that all of the people who liked Harry Potter seemed to be middle-aged female English teachers. Well, once again, I'm vindicated by statistics. Rasmussen.

7. Chavez is a fascist thug.

Journalists could face up to four years in prison for publishing material deemed to harm state stability.

8. It's funny when liberals slip up and declare their true agenda. Barney Frank, for example, admits that he wants to use the Obama plan as a back door to single-payer.

9. Paul Ryan knows this and catches Katrina vanden Heuvel lying about her hidden agenda:

1. I've heard people criticize Gates by saying that you shouldn't talk back to the police because "police have a gun." Not only isn't that a funny joke, it's an absurd argument. Does anybody think that a cop would shoot a man for being sassy?

2. The real problem with people arguing with police is that order breaks down. I'm a public school teacher. I can't have students decide whether to cuss me out in class. Everything would fall apart.

3. I don't see why whether the lady who called the police described Gates as "black" makes any difference.

4. Just to prove that conversations on race inevitably turn stupid:

Murphy also disputed accounts of her client as a white woman in the traditional sense. "The fact is, she's olive-skinned and of Portuguese descent. You wouldn't look at her and say, necessarily, 'Oh, there's a white woman.' You might think she was Hispanic," Murphy said.

5. In fact, the reason the study and discussion of racial things on campuses, from grammar school to college, has exploded in the past thirty years is because race talk is easy to understand. Even those without any academic talent can understand and comment on it.

6. Yes, Obama: One wrong turn in your life, from an elite private school in Hawaii to Columbia to Harvard to Chicago machine politics to president could have easily turned it into a crack-filled Hell. I think Obama should have been a motivational speaker instead of president:

7. Following Obama's policy of calling patriotic Americans "stupid" and "clinging" and insulting friendly nations while doing what he can to appease our enemies, Obama has shut down the ticker that gave Cubans their only non-Communist-censored news (the equivalent of talk radio in the United States). Good job! Because the reason that Cuba represses its people is that we're too informative.

8. Being consistent isn't too hard. I admire and agree with the Catholic nurse who refused to perform the abortion at Mount Sinai hospital in New York. If I owned a hospital, I wouldn't perform unnecessary abortions or, if abortion weren't against my religion, I wouldn't force doctors or nurses to do them. I don't own a hospital, however. A boss should expect his workers to follow his legal rules and have the ability to fire those who refuse.

9. I've sometimes wondered why I don't have any interest whatsoever in anything Harry Potter. I've tried to read it, but couldn't get past the first chapter. I couldn't finish any of the movies either. I don't hate Harry Potter; it just doesn't grab me. I think I have an answer.

I think back to the biggest Potter fans I've known. They're not little kids- they're middle-aged female librarian and English teacher types. The series is just too feminine.

10. I know why the Obama health care plan is failing: "Let's see: more money, less care and freedom. Ummm, no."

11. You can't blame "special interests" this time, as they all supported the Obama plan, even the insurers. It's been a grass-roots effort, like immigration reform a couple of years back.

12. Michael Vick should absolutely be able to play football. All he did was abuse animals. Plenty of players have abused intrinsically valuable people and are playing. That he's able to play is a good sign for national values.

13. The globa...I mean climate change debate is almost over. Soon, people won't be able to make the claim with a strait face anymore. More counter-evidence here.

1. How does Obama know the health care bill will help if he doesn't even know what's in it? Here.

2. This is because of Obama's management style: He's a delegator, "Go do something about health care, will you?"

3. He does seem to be coming apart. Questioning somebody's motives is the last resort of a scoundrel (and the first resort of a liberal).

In a Rose Garden statement from the White House, Obama said Republicans "who openly announce their intentions to block this reform" would "rather score political points" than confront an ailing health care system that is draining the federal budget while leaving 46 million Americans uninsured.

"Time and again we've heard excuses to delay and defeat reform," Obama said a day after Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele called for blocking health care legislation under debate in Congress.

The president said such tactics "play the politics of the moment instead of putting the interests of the people first."

"Some will try to delay action so that special interests can kill it," Obama said.

OK:

-If Obama didn't want to drain the federal budget, he wouldn't propose a new entitlement that...drains the federal budget by 1 trillion dollars.

-It seems that most of the special interests are for the bill- the AMA, unions, Walmart, ACORN, trial lawyers.

-Can we have a moratorium on saying something is the "politics of..." (personal destruction, fear, etc.)?

Why doesn't Obama debate somebody like Bobby Jindal? Obama's so eloquent and stuff; he's sure to win.

1. I wonder if we can take the money we're spending on one of the ponies protected by the ROAM program and give it to the kid below so that he wouldn't have to sell his toys.

2. The desire to save horses instead of people- think of the Africans dying of malaria because environmentalists prefer to save bird eggs- is the result of emotional thinking. A friend told me that T. Boone Pickens' wife supports this expense because she likes horses.

3. I can see the value of saving some endangered species, but the 50,000th Mustang? How many do we need?

4. The first thing Buzz Aldrin, an engineer who could have had a full scholarship to MIT but gave it up to go to West Point, did when he arrived at the moon is take Communion from a kit he took with him.

Aldrin is a Presbyterian, and is known for his statements about God. After landing on the moon, Aldrin radioed earth with these words: "I'd like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way." He received Communion on the surface of the Moon, but kept it secret because of a lawsuit brought by Madalyn Murray O'Hair over the reading of Genesis on Apollo 8. Aldrin, a church elder, used a pastor's home Communion kit given to him by Dean Woodruff and recited words used by his pastor at Webster Presbyterian Church. Webster Presbyterian Church, a local congregation in Webster, Texas (a Houston suburb near the Johnson Space Center) possesses the chalice used for communion on the moon, and commemorates the event annually on the Sunday closest to July 20.

Wikipedia.

Assuming that his Lord's Supper wasn't prepared by an Orthodox or Catholic priest, it was merely a symbolic act and God's body and blood wasn't really present on the moon as Catholics, Orthodox, and some Protestants understand it.

5. Why doesn't Obama support a health care bill with all of the things that both sides agree with like lawsuit reform, ease costly "defensive" medicine, portability, pools, etc., and then we can more precisely debate the other, controversial stuff?

6. I'm glad California has moved in the direction of solving the budget crisis. People criticize Schwarzenegger, but California would be much worse off if he wasn't governor. We'd have higher taxes, illegal aliens would have drivers licenses, and all kinds of social issues would have been promoted by the state.

7. Do you ever get the feeling that nobody cares about Afghanistan? I know why. Since both Democrats and Republicans supported the war in Afghanistan, it's not a political issue.

8. Many of the same people who believe that the moon landing was a government conspiracy want to turn over their health care to Uncle Sam.