Truth (Plus Lies)

Badass.

Andrew Sullivan posted this quote:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute — where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote — where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference … I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish — where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source — where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials.

Which is totally great and struck me as a radical thing to say in our cultural climate. Of course, it was said by JFK, so I guess he doesn’t have to worry about alienating the religious right.
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It should be a no-brainer that running up larger and larger deficits from now until the end of time is a bad thing, but in case there are doubts… (Alright, I’m being uncharitable. Bush is totally gonna halve the deficit by the end of his term. He swears. It’s a ‘goal’.)
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This mayoral candidate from San Antonio has almost convinced me that he didn’t actually mean to have his twin brother fill in for him at a parade.
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Meanwhile…
The origin of the finger is unknown.

In a fighting mood, I read this. Pretty regularly, I’ll try to read the National Review because I’ve found a couple articles there in the past that were intelligent and challenging enough to show me the thoughtful side of partisan Republicans. Unfortunately, I usually just end up bewildered at some writer’s shuffled priorities or misguided logic. For comparison, here’s one of the stupidest articles I’ve ever read. Though from what I understand, I shouldn’t judge NRO writers based on John Derbyshire.

Anyway, this equal pay piece was about half useful to me. I hadn’t really thought critically about the old 76% figure before, but the notion that women tend to choose lower-paying careers actually makes a lot of sense. Of course, just because it makes sense doesn’t mean it’s true, so I tried to google a little to debunk it and I ended up learning about Warren Farrell, who sounds like an interesting character. According to him, in any given field, women actually make more money than men. However, because they usually choose lower-paying career tracks, they just end up having better lives. Hmmm… I’m not sure how credible a source Farrell is. These academics (from 10 years ago) don’t seem very fond of him. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is beyond me.

Back to the article: it lost me at the end when he starts talking about the porn industry, making Hillary Clinton out to be a hypocrite because she doesn’t seem concerned that male porn stars make less than female porn stars. That’s kind of dumb. As opposed to (say) writing for conservative websites, pornstarring is one of those jobs where your sex indisputedly makes a difference (as does your hotness).

Oh but wait! It says at the bottom of the page: “This humor piece was written by Ned Rice”. Humor piece? Were those jokes? I noticed some lame sarcasm, but I just figured he was being a dick.

Further research: The show he writes for apparently didn’t have such a hot first week.

I’m sure that I’m just out of the loop, but I was happy to hear about this site, even if it was because dependable dumbass Rick Santorum is trying to outlaw it.

By way of Slate, I read this piece by Hendrik Hertzberg, which contained some interesting math.

Well, if each of every state’s two senators is taken to represent half that state’s population, then the Senate’s fifty-five Republicans represent 131 million people, while its forty-four Democrats represent 161 million. Looked at another way, the present Senate is the product of three elections, those of 2000, 2002, and 2004. In those elections, the total vote for Democratic senatorial candidates, winning and losing, was 99.7 million; for Republicans it was 97.3 million. The forty-four-person Senate Democratic minority, therefore, represents a two-million-plus popular majority—a circumstance that, unless acres trump people, is at variance with common-sense notions of democracy.

So what’s our excuse in the House? Oh right… gerrymandering.

So apparently a bunch of athletes have surgery to get super-human vision. Sounds pretty similar to steroids to me.

This is the place where I tell you things.

You can also tell me things back.

Deal?