"Where is this confusion coming from?" you're kidding, right? You have to be kidding.

More nonsense from Swampland about the "Obama is a Muslim" foolishness,  this time voiced by an actual member of the Liberal Media Elite:

Where is this confusion coming from? I asked [Alan Cooperman of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life], who suggested this explanation: "Part of what's going on here may be that there's been a relative--especially compared to the previous president--absence of information from the president himself and from the White House about his personal religion and his practice of his personal faith. In the relative vacuum of information, suggestions from the president's critics have been able to gain more currency and uncertainty is rising." I think that's about right. Given how frequently and personally Obama spoke about his Christian faith during the Democratic primaries and the 2008 general election, his relative silence since moving into the White House has been puzzling.

You know, I am old enough to remember when the very fact that John F. Kennedy had a religious affiliation was almost enough to disqualify him for running for the White House. Now it seems any candidate who does not display his religious affiliation on his sleeve and talk about it endless is...well, suspect.

Aside for the terrible, terrible thing that says about where this country is (I almost typed "is going," but that ship has sailed), let's at least be honest.

More than anything else, the issue here is that the current president of the United States is black.

Has been from the beginning and is now, and until the rest of us, the majority of us really, step up and face down the assholes, that is what it will remain.

And all of us will reap the whirlwind.

"If Roman Polanski were a priest, he’d still be working here."

Maureen Dowd this morning in the New York Times on the latest sad bit of foolishness released by the Vatican last week.

Great story, great woman.

This story by Philadelphia Inquirer feature writer Jennifer Lin is as solid and well-written a newspaper as I've read in a long, long time.

It begins with a wonderful anecdote that captures the essence of its subject and closes with final paragraph which encapsulates the essence of the story.And it is can't-stop-reading perfect throughout.

If the Catholic Church is still extant 25 years or so from now and there isn't a Saint Mary Scullion on the rolls, somebody will have screwed up badly.

Today's Inquirer also contains a great story about Mark Twain's tenure as a typesetter for the paper back in 1853-54, written by John Timpane.

Both stories are on the front page and serve as bittersweet reminders of what newspapers used to be and could be and probably never will be again.

No comment.

Religion and The Invention of Lying; you can't have one without the other.

I just watched The Invention of Lying on a DVD and came over here to the computer to try and figure out a simple way of explaining what struck me so much about it. Rather than depending on my meager skills, I did a Google search and found Roger Ebert's review from last September and he nailed it in the first paragraph. I've underlined the key phrase:

In its amiable, quiet, PG-13 way, "The Invention of Lying" is a remarkably radical comedy. It opens with a series of funny, relentlessly logical episodes in a world where everyone always tells the truth, and then slips in the implication that religion is possible only in a world that has the ability to lie. Then it wraps all of this into a sweet love story.

I will bet you any sum you wish to wager that 90% or more of the audience never grasped that. If they had, we'd have had a right wing jihad against the movie long before now.

It's funny, well-acted and filled with nice little touches like various signs that appear for adverts or on gravestones or buildings, the sorts of signage you'd expect in a world where nobody can tell a lie. I cracked up so much I had to put my beer down (and that's serious cracking-up) when I saw the sign on the old age home where Ricky Gervais character's mother is dying

A Sad Place Where Homeless Old People Come to Die

Yeah, maybe I'm anticipating the future and  my own "golden" years.

There was one plot point that bothered me throughout: not only does everyone tell the truth and nothing but the truth, but they blurt it out in all its implications at every opportunity. That does not compute. Just because you cannot lie doesn't necessarily mean you have to be honest to a fault, recounting your blind date's faults the moment you see him or telling your boss you loathed him.

Nit-pick. All in all, one of the best flicks I've seen in a while. And the scene Ebert cites where Gervais has to explain The Man In The Sky (God) to the world and try to make sense of the whole concept is truly priceless, worth renting for that alone.

50 Most Loathsome Americans, 2009.

This is quite a list.

Turn out the lights, the party's over.

The town that gave us the Tea Party is reaping the benefits of the well-conceived philosophy of that forward-looking, just-us-folks movement.

Or maybe not.

After reading the above,go check out the comments here for a good time.

Actually, it's not a good time at all, just another one of those sad, sad stories that reinforces the suspicion that we are becoming a country too dumb to survive.

I assume you have all seen similar signposts along the road to disaster in the news lately, such as the actions of legislators in Virginia and Georgia to protect the citizenry from Microchip-666 (which is, you know, foreseen in the Bible) or the state of public education in the state which wants to secede from these United States (I could fill this and several other posts with links to Texas madness alone) or...well, you know.

All I can say is, thank the gods that we have our noble Washington press corps to focus on the real issues rather than get caught up in nonsense.

You betcha.

This Almost Insures That I Will See Avatar.

Seriously?

The Worship of Nature?

Seriously?

Religious wingnuts as a whole are not just born-again types.