Double Reading

What value is there in having a political debate and limiting responses to 30 seconds?
I’d rather have candidates talk about one or two issues and talk for five minutes and really explain their thoughts than feel pressured to fit everything into 30 seconds (which moderators seem to selectively enforce anyway…).

“John the Revelator” has been one of my favorite Depeche Mode songs ever since I first heard it on Playing the Angel (which also happens to be my favorite Depeche Mode album [yes, I'm not quite a Gen-X'er]).
For the fun of it, I was reading about the song today and came across this amazing unofficial [...]

After all the discussion about being gay in Iran following Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s comment about there being no gay people in Iran, I found this Newsweek interview with a gay Iranian (who left Iran for the U.S.) interesting and thought it was worth sharing.
One part of the interview especially struck me. The man says:

It’s [...]

If Iraq was a school in the United States and failed on eight out of eighteen benchmarks that the Bush administration set for it, the school would lose it’s funding and be shut down, right?
Why not with Iraq?

“They are trying to make us more afraid of fixing the problem than the problem itself.”
Rachel Maddow said this tonight on Countdown about America’s health care problem. While it can certainly be applied to health care, I think this is basically the conservative position against almost anything progressive. It’s the best way to maintain the [...]

Fact of the day: Bill Breeden was the only person arrested for anything having to do with the Iran-Contra Affair.
Who is Bill Breeden? He’s from John Poindexter’s home town and held a sign for a street named in Poindexter’s honor for “ransom.” He was arrested and jailed for this. None of the military or government [...]

After the Virginia Tech shootings last week a lot of people have been making a big deal of the fact that the guy who purchased the guns had a history of mental illness, and that “people with mental illness shouldn’t be able to buy guns.”
The whole idea of mental illness is still very subjective and [...]

I know I just said that I had one favorite argument from the Christopher Hitchens piece, but I forgot the second one that is closer to the end:

For this reason, I would not prohibit it even if I thought I could. Very generous of me, you may say. But will the religious grant me the [...]

I want to say that I hate to admit this, but I’m not sure that I do hate to admit it. Let’s say I have mixed feelings about the outcome of the “Duke Lacrosse Rape Case:” the North Carolina attorney general dropped all charges and so the men involved are all innocent in the eyes [...]

During Easter Mass, the Pope made some comments about Iraq such as

Nothing positive comes from Iraq, torn apart by continual slaughter as the civil population flees

Being that he is the Pope, I think it’s safe to assume he’s speaking the word of God or something like that, right? Isn’t the Pope basically God’s representation on [...]