I missed Dean Barnett’s excellent post on the Pew Research Center’s poll on religion in America. Very good stuff. Best part:

When asked whether Islam was more likely to encourage violence than other religions, incredibly only a miniscule 36% of the respondents said yes. This is pretty amazing. Is it really a slam on Islam if you happen to notice that the vast majority of terror incidents committed over the past several years have been committed by the religion’s practitioners?

While I really shouldn’t have to say this, in the interests of self-preservation I will: Obviously not all Muslims are terrorists. Obviously only a teensy-tiny portion of Muslims are terrorists. But, and the following is not really deniable, a high percentage of terrorists are Muslims. Facts are facts.

The Pew respondents must have bee thinking about that wave of Unitarian suicide bombers we’ve heard so much about.

“I’m about to do the doo.”

Whitney Houston expressing to her husband–and a camera–her need to relieve herself during a taping of Being Bobby Brown.

“PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW what I think about . . .”

Say what you want about the MSM and the Old Media, but you’ll never see David Remnick–or, heck, even Maureen Dowd–start a sentence that way.

If you haven’t read it yet, Joseph Bottum’s piece on capital punishment in First Things is exceptional.

Bottum makes a series of complicated, important arguments about the death penalty, and how Christians should understand it, but the most interesting is this one:

a state has a responsibility to enforce positive law and exact punishment. This is true even in the case of victimless crimes, and it is perhaps particularly true in the case of crimes with victims. All political theories note that ancient legal systems began with the outlawing of private revenge, but the state does not thereby become a sort of hired agent or substitute avenger. That is what a theory of civil harms is for, and such torts are addressed not in criminal but civil courts, where the plaintiff, not the government, collects the monetary damages. Genuine crimes, in a modern setting, are instead committed against society and its laws—just as, in medieval England, all crimes were crimes against the king. In strict legal theory, the victims are incidental; the entire body politic is injured by a crime, and the social disorder of that crime is what a government’s criminal-justice system must address.

Sometimes this requires educating the public about the wrongness of the crime. Often it aims at rehabili tating the criminal. Always it must keep the central promise of rightly operating government: the pledge that law-breakers will prosper less than law-abiders. And, again, under certain extreme circumstances, these legitimate purposes of social justice could require the death of criminals.

In other words, both a government’s right of self-defense and its duty to preserve the normal justice of the social order can potentially issue in executions. But neither of these gives the state a license to attempt either revenge or the high justice implied in the story of Michael Ross. Capital punishment may occasionally be necessary in a modern democracy, but it is never right, for the death penalty is not in a line with other punishments. A five-year sentence and a twenty-year sentence, even a life sentence, are related as more or less severe forms of imprisonment. Execution belongs to another order of punishment.

Indeed, most arguments for the essential justice of the death penalty admit this point—and even insist upon it. If murder is not like other crimes, if the spilling of innocent blood is uniquely horrifying, then the punishment of death, as the spilling of guilty blood, must also belong to a higher species of justice: not simply a more extreme version of other punishments that seek to correct social disorders, but an entirely different thing that aims at restoring the universe and matching a deadly crime with a similarly deadly punishment.

Under any Christian understanding of political theory, where does the legal system of a modern demo cracy gain authority to act on this high level? Cer tainly, many different kinds of governments over many centuries have claimed and exercised the power of life and death. But history is no explanation for why the State of Connecticut should continue to have, in this one case, a license to break free from the social aims of normal justice and pursue closure for a story of high, cosmic justice.

This is just one strand of Bottum’s very elegant and persuasive argument; you’ll be doing yourself a disservice if you don’t hunker down for the full ride.

From my blog-crush:

Miller and Law split following Law’s admission he slept with Daisy Wright, but “they reportedly met in private in England for secret talks in a bid to rescue their relationship.”

The “met in private for secret talks in a bid to rescue” makes this sound a tad more important than it really is. Unless Siena Miller is secretly in the Delta Force, they were basically on a date, not training to topple a Panamanian strongman. I’m guessing at no point did someone pull off their glasses in front of a huge electronic map of the globe and say, “We’ve got six hours gentlemen…”. The problem is that Jude Law would have sex with a porcupine if it made eye contact, not that freedom and liberty as we know it is threatened.

The Cake Editrix sends us to a page with video of guns being fired at Samurai swords. I couldn’t get the machine gun video to load, but in this video a 9mm is fired at a Katana. The bullets get sliced in two.

Ferreals.

While serious liberals like Peter Beinart and Ed Kilgore are trying to rebuild the Democratic party and create a liberalism for the post-9/11 era, Markous Moulitsas is intent on reducing the Democratic party to rubble. I note this, not triumphantly, but with some worry: A faltering Democratic party merely provides room for Republicans to get by without doing the intellectual heavy-lifting. I think most of us would agree that the marketplace of ideas works best when we have two healthy, intellectually vibrant political parties.

So read this “litmus test” for Democratic candidates from Daily Kos:

Does candidate ‘distance himself’ from the party and/or its leaders, or is he proud to be a Democrat?

Does he talk like a bureaucrat or like a regular person?

Does she make it clear that she opposes Bush and the Republicans?

Does she back down when the corporate press/media or Republican pundits attack him, or does she stand by her words?

Does he sleepwalk through the campaign, or does he act like he wants to win?

Kos goes on to add, “Notice the complete lack of ideology.”

It is this lack of ideology, of which Kos is so proud, that spells certain doom for Democrats if the Kos-wing of the party is allowed to continually cow the party establishment, despite their minority status. The far-left has waged an anti-intellectual assault on liberalisms best thinkers, which has lead to this tyranny of obstructionism-as-ideology.

Note the wording of this litmus test: “Does she make it clear that she opposes Bush and the Republicans?” Oppose Bush and which Republicans? Tom DeLay? John McCain? Oppose them on what? The principles of preemption and democratization? Energy policy? Support for the Texas Rangers? Opposition to steroids? Everything?

And oppose them with what, exactly.

The fringe of the Democratic party isn’t interested in any of these questions. But if the Democrats want to return to power, eventually this fringe will have to be cut loose, and not wooed.

From ESPN:

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