From Bill Keller, Executive Editor of The New York Times:

Asking Candidates Tougher Questions About Faith

This year’s Republican primary season offers us an important opportunity to confront our scruples about the privacy of faith in public life — and to get over them. We have an unusually large number of candidates, including putative front-runners, who belong to churches that are mysterious or suspect to many Americans. Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons, a faith that many conservative Christians have been taught is a “cult” and that many others think is just weird. (Huntsman says he is not “overly religious.”) Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum are all affiliated with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity, which has raised concerns about their respect for the separation of church and state, not to mention the separation of fact and fiction.

I honestly don’t care if Mitt Romney wears Mormon undergarments beneath his Gap skinny jeans, or if he believes that the stories of ancient American prophets were engraved on gold tablets and buried in upstate New York, or that Mormonism’s founding prophet practiced polygamy (which was disavowed by the church in 1890). Every faith has its baggage, and every faith holds beliefs that will seem bizarre to outsiders. I grew up believing that a priest could turn a bread wafer into the actual flesh of Christ.

But I do want to know if a candidate places fealty to the Bible, the Book of Mormon (the text, not the Broadway musical) or some other authority higher than the Constitution and laws of this country. It matters to me whether a president respects serious science and verifiable history — in short, belongs to what an official in a previous administration once scornfully described as “the reality-based community.” I do care if religious doctrine becomes an excuse to exclude my fellow citizens from the rights and protections our country promises.

And I care a lot if a candidate is going to be a Trojan horse for a sect that believes it has divine instructions on how we should be governed.

(Emphasis in the above is mine.)

Reminds me a lot of the type of rhetoric I heard as a kid when Jack Kennedy was the Democratic nominee. There were many in small-town Oklahoma who were worried that Kennedy’s “fealty” would be to the Pope and not to the constitution. Enlightened folks, like my parents, may have not liked his politics, but I never heard that crap spoken at my house. Now, it’s not the under-educated, but the over-educated elites among us that are terrified of someone with religious faith.

We sure have fallen deep down the rabbit hole . . .

ELECTIONS! HAVE! CONSEQUENCES!

Obama administration will accept no more public input for federal fishery strategy:

The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation’s oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters.

This announcement comes at the time when the situation supposedly still is “fluid” and the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force still hasn’t issued its final report on zoning uses of these waters. That’s a disappointment, but not really a surprise for fishing industry insiders who have negotiated for months with officials at the Council on Environmental Quality and bureaucrats on the task force. These angling advocates have come to suspect that public input into the process was a charade from the beginning.

Wouldn’t be the first time this administration has LIED to us, damn sure won’t be the last!

Led by NOAA’s Jane Lubchenco, the task force has shown no overt dislike of recreational angling, but its indifference to the economic, social and biological value of the sport has been deafening.

Additionally, Lubchenco and others in the administration have close ties to environmental groups who would like nothing better than to ban recreational angling. And evidence suggests that these organizations have been the engine behind the task force since before Obama issued a memo creating it last June.

Apple pie, Chevrolet and fishin’ — real Americana — what’s not to like?

That same tunnel vision, in which recreational angling and commercial fishing are indiscriminately lumped together as harmful to the resource, has persisted with the task force, despite protests by the angling industry.

As more evidence of collusion, the green groups began clamoring for an Executive Order to implement the task force’s recommendations even before the public comment period ended in February. Fishing advocates had no idea that this was coming.

These elites in Washington don’t want you to be able to fish the rivers, lakes and streams of America. Out here, California is letting the entire central valley agricultural zone wither and die from lack of water — just to “save” the Delta Smelt. After all, to these enviro-ideologues Mother Earth is a hell of a lot more important than humans. We are the stain, the virus, the planet’s scourge that will be the end of all . . .

Morlock fears that “what we’re seeing coming at us is an attempted dismantling of the science-based fish and wildlife model that has served us so well. There’s no basis in science for the agendas of these groups who are trying to push the public out of being able to fish and recreate.

“Conflicts (user) are overstated and problems are manufactured. It’s all just an excuse to put us off the water.”

After all, it’s just fishin’ — won’t hurt nobody to hang up the ol’ rod and reel and instead sit in front of the tube and chant praises to the Obamessiah. Nah — nuthin’ wrong with that . . .

You will submit — You will obey — You will like it!

After all, as they say, “We won — get over it!”

In a post today The Anchoress is asking this question about celebrities, our elected leaders and our representatives and illustrates that thought by laundry-listing the egregious amount of energy consumption of a typical U2 concert. As one might imagine, that number is HUGE! But wait, there’s more. The other evening Nancy Pelosi and other D.C. elites had a rockin’ good time at the D.C. U2 concert. On that The Anchoress writes:

We are told that many politicians were at this concert; Nancy Pelosi was there. Undoubtedly many people who lecture us daily about the environment and are diligently working to ram the ruinous cap and trade boondoggle down our throats were enjoying the music, the lights, the pyrotechnics, the spectacle. Then they got into their waiting limos, and went home to their well-lit, well-heated and spacious homes.

You and I must turn out all of the lights, put on our sweaters, air-dry our laundry and consider biking everywhere we go, because we are energy gluttons who are killing the planet.

But for the rest of them -our betters- why the show goes on, and on, and on. A “crisis” for which you and I must change our lives, but not they theirs.

Cognitive dissonance, anyone? Some are more equal than others.

Ah, yes. Much more equal than you and me — Oh ya betcha! Patrick Gavin at Politico notes:

Bono dedicated “New Year’s Day” to Ted Kennedy and “Beautiful Day” to Eunice and Timmy Shriver.

In response Anchoress quips:

They could not be bothered to mention that Bono dedicated his showpiece number, “One” to President George W. Bush & US Congress for “AIDS, malaria relief efforts in Africa, saving millions of lives. .”

So, again, some are more equal than others. It’s a hypocritical value the media itself promotes, endlessly.

Still, rollicking in the euphoria of a quadzillion-mega-watt music concert while admonishing the rest of us to grope around in the dark and wear a couple-dozen sweaters for warmth to save Gaea pales in comparison to the hundred-plus mind-sick Hollywood elites that signed the petition to “Free Roman Polanski”. Let’s go over this again. At age 44, film-director Roman Polanski got into a jacuzzi at Jack Nicholson’s house and drugged a 13-year-old girl with Quaaludes and alcohol, then had sex with her against her will, and then for his big finish sodomized her to boot.

ROMAN POLANSKI RAPED AND SODOMIZED A THIRTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL!

He even confessed, and was going to be given a slap on the wrist by a Los Angeles judge but pathetic piece-’o-shit coward that he was/is, Polanski fled the U.S. and has been living the life of luxury in Europe for the last three decades. Now, when it’s finally time to pay the piper this 70-some-odd-year-old dirtbag is being defended by his International “peers”. Here’s the text of the petition.

We have learned the astonishing news of Roman Polanski’s arrest by the Swiss police on September 26th, upon arrival in Zurich (Switzerland) while on his way to a film festival where he was due to receive an award for his career in filmmaking.

His arrest follows an American arrest warrant dating from 1978 against the filmmaker, in a case of morals.

Filmmakers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision. It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, is used by the police to apprehend him.

By their extraterritorial nature, film festivals the world over have always permitted works to be shown and for filmmakers to present them freely and safely, even when certain States opposed this.

The arrest of Roman Polanski in a neutral country, where he assumed he could travel without hindrance, undermines this tradition: it opens the way for actions of which no one can know the effects.

Roman Polanski is a French citizen, a renown and international artist now facing extradition. This extradition, if it takes place, will be heavy in consequences and will take away his freedom.

Filmmakers, actors, producers and technicians—everyone involved in international filmmaking—want him to know that he has their support and friendship.

On September 16th, 2009, Mr. Charles Rivkin, the US Ambassador to France, received French artists and intellectuals at the embassy. He presented to them the new Minister Counselor for Public Affairs at the embassy, Ms Judith Baroody. In perfect French she lauded the Franco-American friendship and recommended the development of cultural relations between our two countries.

If only in the name of this friendship between our two countries, we demand the immediate release of Roman Polanski.

Gee, bet ya didn’t know that a film festival was the equivalent of an arrest-free zone. Kinda like bein’ 12 miles off the coast or something? What kind of cankered gray-matter does it take to think up or agree with something like that? Glad you asked. Here’s the list of moral-reprobates that signed this piece of garbage. Allahpundit at Hot Air writes about them:

Most are European and unfamiliar, but among the people whose movies I’ll never watch again: Jonathan Demme, John Landis, Michael Mann, Martin Scorsese, and, bless his heart, Woody Allen, who I guess was forced to sign lest the press seize on the idea of a guy who married his almost-stepdaughter passing judgment on Polanski. Open question to any of these rape-defending turds: How far would you have let Polanski go before deciding that, hey, he probably should serve some time after all? What if he punched the kid in the face when he was raping her? Beat her with a tire iron? Seriously, how far?

How far, indeed. If it had been a Catholic priest that had done this the liberal tar & feathers would have come out decades ago. If if had been you or I, we’d be in the slammer for ever. But since it was done by an honored artiste, well heavens, we can’t have our betters locked up and not entertaining us over a little thing like RAPING AND SODOMIZING THIRTEEN YEAR OLD GIRLS!

Michael Deacon at the Telegraph.co.UK reminds us of what Polanski said about the case during an interview a year after fleeing the US:

“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”

I don’t even need to comment on that statement, it is so self-explanatory and incriminating — even without his confession, which the LA District Attorney’s office had/has. Speaking of which, LA District Attorney Patrick Frey (the blogger Patterico) has been on this story like white on risotto for the last few days and is thick in the middle of it with Washington Post writer/blogger Anne Applebaum who has been rather apologetic about Polanski and would like to see him released. Here’s just a sample of how Frey handily dismantles Applebaum’s feeble arguments:

Applebaum here concedes that she was inaccurate to claim Polanski had a “trial,” but claims the full truth would be too confusing. She essentially implies that I am being overly technical. Not at all. Here is what she originally wrote:

There is evidence of judicial misconduct in the original trial. There is evidence that Polanski did not know her real age. Polanski, who panicked and fled the U.S. during that trial . . .

This passage implies that there may be some doubt about Polanski’s guilt. If there is evidence of judicial misconduct during a “trial” — coupled with evidence that the defendant may not be guilty — then the defendant’s guilt is questionable. But that’s not what happened. Instead, Polanski pled guilty, and testified under oath that he knew the girl was 13.

I certainly can understand why Applebaum would want to withhold these facts from her readers. Telling readers these facts might muddle Applebaum’s message that Polanski is a poor put-upon old man who survived the Holocaust and may well be innocent. But it wouldn’t be confusing to tell readers the truth. It would merely detract from Applebaum’s ridiculous position.

Go read it all. The bottom line is that this big-newspaper writer believes that her readers “can’t handle the truth.” You know, like they are better than us mere-mortals readers. Circular post, I know . . .

Are They Really More Equal Than US?

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