» Can someone explain to me how a defense budget that is increased 4 % over the previous year will "gut the military" and "leave us weaker to pay for the president's domestic programs?"

» Anyone else think it strange that in one breath Camille Paglia chastised Michelle Obama for being overly familiar with the Queen of England (not showing enough respect to a monarch) and Barack Obama for bowing to the King of Saudi Arabia (showing too much respect for a monarch)?  And then following it up with this paragraph:

Probably the main reason for my unorthodox view of politics (as in my instant approval of Sarah Palin) is that I had much more childhood contact with working-class life than appears to be the norm among current American columnists. One of my grandfathers was a barber, and the other was a leather worker at the Endicott-Johnson shoe factory in upstate New York. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, my father was able to attend college, the only one in his large family to do so. I was born while he was still in college and mopping floors in the cafeteria. Years later, he became a high-school teacher and then a professor at a Jesuit college, but we never left our immigrant family roots in industrial Endicott. To this day, I have more rapport with campus infrastructure staffers (maintenance, security) than I do with other professors or, for that matter, writers. Don't get me started on the hermetic bourgeois arrogance of American literati!

Ugh.  I understand why conservatives love her (because she loves Rush and always prefaces her token pledge of support for Obama with a litany of (IMHO) wrong-headed criticisms), but why does anyone else?

» Conservadudes, the fellow who did the poll you're citing to show that Obama is "the most polarizing president" says that conclusion is unfair.  He emphasized that the very large discrepancy between Obama's support among Democrats and among Republicans is driven by long-term trends and by the very enthusiastic reaction to Obama within his own party, no because Obama is especially polarizing.

» The Grace Conversation blog is off to a rocky start, in my opinion.  I like the concept, and they're getting plenty of comments.  However, I think they should have allowed people to submit comments but not published them.  The 4 main authors could have worked together to incorporate any key contributions from the comments into the main posts in such a way that they remained coherent.  The free-for-all of a blog with comments doesn't necessarily make for good reading (especially for someone who comes upon it after the fact) or a disciplined focus (which is something I think a discussion like that one really needs).

Another Cal Thomas quote, this one from a recent WaPo article by Kathleen Parker:

If people who call themselves Christians want to see any influence in the culture, then they ought to start following the commands of Jesus and people will be so amazed that they will be attracted to Him...The problem isn't political. The problem is moral and spiritual...You have the choice between a way that works and brings no credit or money or national attention...Or, a way that doesn't work that gets you lots of attention and has little influence on the culture.

Another quote from Meacham's article:

The columnist Cal Thomas was an early figure in the Moral Majority who came to see the Christian American movement as fatally flawed in theological terms. "No country can be truly 'Christian'," Thomas says. "Only people can. God is above all nations, and, in fact, Isaiah says that 'All nations are to him a drop in the bucket and less than nothing'." Thinking back across the decades, Thomas recalls the hope—and the failure. "We were going through organizing like-minded people to 'return' America to a time of greater morality. Of course, this was to be done through politicians who had a difficult time imposing morality on themselves!"