Month: January 2009

Katy Perry, singer of "I Kissed A Girl," talks about her Christian faith. Daniel Radosh reacts:

At one point Katy is asked about promoting homosexuality. This was something of a concern among conservative Christians and probably says more than anything about how disconnected much of that group is from mainstream culture. The idea that I Kissed A Girl is a "pro-gay" song is just laughable. In fact it’s as about as pro-gay as Girls Gone Wild, appropriating and diminishing female sexual desire for the express purpose of pandering to juvenile straight-boy fantasies.

A reader writes:

Your atheist readers make the classic move of pretending to be the referee when in fact they are just another player on the field. They are treating it as an intellectual puzzle rather than what it actually is for every last of us: a lived commitment. This is why the term "Atheist" itself is so misleading. You’re an atheist, fine.  I’m an A-Vishnuist, and an A-Buddhist, and an A-Teapotist.  Telling me what you don’t believe tells me very little, but it’s a really cool way to get into the conversation in such a way that everyone has to defend their positions except you — you get to attack.

This would be valid were this merely an intellectual exercise. There you can usefully indulge the distinctly modern prejudice that doubt is more reasonable than belief. But you can no more avoid making a positive choice about the source of meaning in your life and the universe than you can avoid living in some country. You can talk about which country is best to live in, but the atheist pretends you can live in no country at all.

You gotta live somewhere, and you gotta believe in something, because your beliefs are being expressed every day in how you live your life. Atheists should be forced to articulate their positive position (say, secular humanism) as price of admission to the conversation. So when your reader wants to "put the burden of proof on the one making a specific, positive claim," I simply point out that living your life is a specific, positive claim, and thus everyone has to bear the burden of proof equally.

Yes, it’s true! That cardboard cut-out I nearly Favreaued at an Inaugural bash was very bi-racial:

So why not take the time to find a black body for Barack? "I think it may have been sloppy," says Campbell. "That’s just a stock image, a stock body that they had." Again, Advance Graphics declined to give a direct answer. Apparently, finding a generic photograph of a black man in a suit was too much to handle out in Utah.

Andrew Sprung thinks about Obama’s reference to the Apostle Paul in his Inaugural Address:

Obama, like Lincoln, and the Transcendentalists before him, and countless Americans afterward, asserts a similar movement in American history. The Declaration and the Constitution express political principles as perfect in their way (so Obama’s invocations of them imply) as Paul’s love. Indeed, Obama has asserted that they are in effect political translations of that love.

Andrew does not convince me entirely – he’s reading too much into too little. But the eschewal of "childish things" as a mark of a man: this is a message we all need to hear.

Her morning elegance by Oren Lavie. Pure charm:

A Russian journalist opines:

As ridiculous as it might seem, I think it is because he is black. Because now the old adage that “over there they shoot black people” no longer holds water.

One of the foundations of Russian foreign relations is the abiding conviction that “over there” everything is just like it is “over here”: manipulated elections, strict control over the media, corruption, and nationalism. The Americans are just better at covering it up. This is why Putin, at recent talks, suddenly broke into a rant about firing American journalists for censorship.

And no “democratic values” exist it all; it’s all just a scam to keep the populace reined in.

I suspect that Obama’s election will cause even the most loyal viewers of [Russian pro-government television program] Vremya to experience doubts about this scheme.

Matt Miller points me to this article by Bruce Bartlett, one of very few conservatives who didn’t abandon his principles in the face of party pressure these past eight years:

I think conservatives would better spend their diminished political capital figuring out how to finance the welfare state at the least cost to the economy and individual liberty, rather than fighting a losing battle to slash popular spending programs. But this will require them to accept the necessity of higher revenues.

It is simply unrealistic to think that tax cuts will continue to be a viable political strategy when the budget deficit exceeds $1 trillion, as it will this year. Nor is it realistic to think that taxes can be kept at 19 percent of GDP when spending is projected to grow by about 50 percent of GDP over the next generation, according to both the Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accountability Office. And that’s without any new spending programs being enacted.

If conservatives refuse to participate in the debate over how revenues will be raised, then liberals will do it on their own, which will likely give us much higher tax rates and a tax system that is more harmful to growth than necessary to fund the government. Instead of opposing any tax hike, I think it makes more sense for conservatives to figure out how best to raise the additional revenue that will be raised in any event.

Michael Gerson is understandably upset that PEPFAR coordinator Mark Dybul was fired after talk that he would be asked to stay on:

…someone at State or the White House determined that sacrificing Dybul would appease a few vocal, liberal interest groups. One high-ranking Obama official admitted that the decision was "political." Yet the AIDS coordinator is not a typical political job, distributed as spoils, like some deputy assistant position at the Commerce Department. It involves directing a massive emergency operation to provide lifesaving drugs, through complex logistics, to some of the most distant places on Earth. And now that operation may be months without effective leadership — undermining morale, complicating interagency cooperation, delaying new prevention initiatives and postponing budget decisions.

I don’t know why events transpired the way they did and it sure looks regrettable to me. You don’t have to keep anyone on from a previous administration, but if you do ask them, you shouldn’t then subject them to this. Jason Zengerle wrote about Dybul a few days ago: "There are a lot of people in the Democratic orbit who want Dybul’s job. It’ll be interesting to see who Obama picks for the post. And I wonder if Obama moved Dybul out because he had one particular person in mind."

Head trauma for a middle-aged former football player turns the brain into something where "the damage looks similar to that of an 80-year-old with dementia caused by Alzheimer’s disease." Happy Superbowl. 

Sao Miguel Dos Milagres, Brazil, 4 pm.