We’re hearing a lot these days about the Republican Party.  We hear/read about where they’re were.  We hear a lot about where they’re supposedly going. Then we hear a lot about where they should be going, which is different depending on your exact political views.  It’s all exciting debate, and one that is necessary to ensure that the party is successful in the future.

What we don’t hear a lot about these days is the fortunes of the Democratic Party.  The assumption seems to be that there needs to be no discussion of this party’s future because they’re currently in power.  Yet, the actions of those inside the party, especially of those in positions of power, could have reverberations that affect the electoral success of the party come next year.  The only thing that is possibly more important than actions themselves is the response to those actions.

So far, the response to some of the scandals by party members has been pretty awful, and it could harm the Democrats in 2010.

Officially, the general rule of thumb of politics in America is that every politician is out for himself or herself, and that the actions of one member do not spell doom for their whole party.  This is said to be different from European parliamentary systems where misdeeds by one politician could determine the fate of the whole party.  As such, politicians in America enjoy a great deal of political freedom to vote in whatever way they determine to be correct, even against the interests of their party, and are not bound by party loyalty.

In practice, the story is much different.  The actions of several people in Congress (or one at the presidential level) can have sweeping implications for that person’s party.  The Republicans lost Congress in 2006 partially because of weariness from the Iraq War, but also partially because of some reported transgressions from members of Congress, such as former Rep. Tom Delay.  In 2008, Republicans in Congress were again in trouble, and while the races in Congress were in large part distinct from the race for the presidency, where Democrats led races for Congress, so did Obama.  So yes, what happens in one branch of government can influence the fortunes of another branch.

Thus, not only do Republicans need to learn lessons from 2006 and 2008, but so do Democrats.

Yet, it doesn’t appear that the Democrats are actually learning these lessons.  The two biggest scandals I can think of are those affecting Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.  Dodd, of course, has been embroiled in several scandals.  The first was last year’s receiving favorable terms on the refinancing of his home by Countrywide Financial prior to that institution’s collapse.  In his capacity as Chariman of the Senate Banking Committee, Dodd has been slammed for his failure to forsee the financial crisis, being involved in an attempt to retroactively limit bonuses of executives at banks that are receiving federal money.  There are others as well.  The latest Quinnipiac poll, from April, has Dodd 16 points behind Republican Rob Simmons.

Pelosi, meanwhile, has most recently been involved in a battle with the CIA regarding what she knew about the waterboarding of Iraq War detainees.  Like Dodd, Pelosi’s approval ratings are dropping.

It is things like these that could hurt the Democrats.  However, as I indicated in the article introduction, what may be worse than the actions themselves is the response to them.  The problem is that political parties have a tendency to protect their own (with certain exceptions).  This is nothing new, of course.  The Republicans have done this before, and usually only an indictment got them to change their minds (see Ted Stevens in 2008 or Tom Delay in 2006).  It now seem that the Democrats are following suit with Dodd and Pelosi.

Although they’re not moving to publically support Dodd or Pelosi, neither are the Democrats criticizing them either.  While this may seem like a silent disapproval to the Democrats, to the public it will seem like silent acceptance.  The perception would be rightly deserved, since in politics, this is what silence usually means.

This cannot be the course Democrats need to take if they wish to hold on to Congress in 2011.  They must demand their leaders to come clean, in Dodd’s case his involvement with Countrywide and other scandals, and with Pelosi her knowledge of the torture of detainees.  If they don’t, it may not be only Dodd and Pelosi losing seats in the next Congress.

Silence is simply not acceptable.  If the Democrats think that saying nothing will protect them, they are dead wrong.  While the cases involving a few members may not be enough to lose them their overall majority (this year), they would lose any hope they had of maintaining a supermajority.  However, if more scandals are uncovered (and it is inevitable that they will be), the Democrats could find themselves in the minority again very quickly.  It will be worse if it appears the party is trying to cover up these scandals, or at least say nothing about them.

Honesty and an adherance to ethical standards is going to be important for the Democrats in the coming years.  The party has a chance to remain relevant if they fully investigate the scandals that come before them, including those in their own party.  However, if the party does nothing about these transgressions, it will be back to the wilderness for them.

So today the road in front of my house was full of police.  No, they weren’t there to investigate a crime.  Well, sort of, but more in a minute.  However, the crime wasn’t one of murder or even robbery.  No, the police were there to look out for cars, and specifically, drivers in those cars.  What kind of drivers?

Those not wearing seatbelts and those using cell phones while driving, of course.

Every state in the United States has some sort of seatbelt law on the books.  According to the Governors Highway Safety Association, 28 have primary seat belt laws, where officers may fine you if you are caught not wearing a belt.  21 states have secondary seat belt laws, where you can be fined if there’s another finable offense.  Only New Hampshire has the least restrictive law, covering only people below 18.  The laws vary.  Most seem to cover only front-seat drivers/passengers.  Some also cover the rear seats.  In my state, Connecticut, you can be fined $15 for your first seatbelt offense.

Cell phone bans vary more greatly, and are split not only between phone use and text messaging, but between phone handheld use and all forms of use.  That’s then further split between those under 18, school bus drivers, and all drivers.  So, I’ll only use my state as an example here.  Connecticut restricts use of handheld phoning by all drivers, all phone use by schoolbus drivers and those under 18, and text messaging by all.  However, a number of states have yet to put any bans into law.  In Connecticut, you can be fined up to $100 for a first time cell phone use offense, which is significantly higher than the ones for seatbelt laws.  Those below 18 can have their licenses pulled for 30 days for the first time, plus a $125 fine to get it back.

Perhaps because not wearing a seatbelt affects only you, but the use of a cell phone while not paying attention could make you cause an accident?  Perhaps.

Now, it’s not that I so much have a problem with these laws.  They’re both ostensibly to keep the safety of oneself and others.  Though, I could be inclined, if I had the time, to make a libertarian argument for repeal of seatbelt laws.  The ones about cellphones, though, are much more difficult to argue against, given that they’re supposed to protect other people too.

What I have a problem with is the enforcement of these laws and, in some cases, the fines levied.

Lets face it.  Despite their supposed life-saving natures, both seatbelt laws and cell phone laws are poorly enforced, and for good reason.  It’s very difficult to see if someone is actually breaking these laws when they’re in the normal flow of traffic.  Short of pulling up besides a car and seeing someone not wearing their belt or using a phone, a police officer is not likely to see it.  Not unless someone is already swerving in their lane because they’re paying more attention to their conversation than the road.  The only other time is when an accident has already happened.

So instead of actually trying to enforce the laws day in-day out, many states have begun using (and for a long time have used) these “click-it-or-ticket” campaigns.  Part of it is education, mostly on the side of seatbelt use.  The commercials are somewhat fear-mongering in nature.  Take a look:

However, part of the campaign is routine traffic stops like happened today in front of my house.  The police will block off a section of road.  One set of officers will look for offenders, and if the officers see them, will notify another set of officers a little down the road to flag the offender down to give them a ticket.  Basically, it allows the police to write a giant set of tickets in one day.

This might be acceptable if the police were doing it every day and in multiple sections of town, but they don’t.  It’s only rarely done, probably on the course of less than once a month, and it’s usually only done in one section of town.  Obviously, the police can’t use the scenario from two sentences ago.  It’d slow down traffic everyday day for one thing.  However, for what’s ostensibly supposed to be an action of deterrent to the offender and other drivers, it doesn’t really work.  Many people still ignore the seatbelt and cell phone laws.

Is it really any wonder, then, that when these roadblocks happen people like to snark, “Guess they’re lacking in their quota for the month!”?

The other issue is the amount of the fine.  Maybe this isn’t as much the case for the cell phone fines, but on the seatbelt ones, surely it’d send a stronger message to people to buckle up if the fee was more than $15?  $15 is what I might spend on a moderately priced dinner out.  $15 is what I used to pay for my Netflix account every month before the fees went up.  $15 is one of those fees that people will pay because it’s typically cheap enough to pay on the spot, or quickly after getting home.  No one is really going to make a fuss over $15 in this day-in-age, even with the recession.

That might be the point.  I’ll use another traffic stop-related example to explain why.

A couple months ago, my sister got pulled over.  I forget the exact charge, but we all pretty much think it’d trumped up by the officer targeting a minor.  So, a few weeks ago, my sister goes to court.  She and my parents thought it would be for a full hearing, but instead they were called in to discuss the incident.  After the incident was explained by my sister, the fine, which was well over $100 in the beginning, was lowered to $35.  Needless to say, my sister decided to pay it.  Basically, it was the infraction version of a plea bargain.  Admit guilt right then and there and pay less.

After all, why not?  You’ve already been called to court once.  My sister had to take a day off from work, for example.  She’s a high school senior working part time hourly.  She had to wait in court all morning, and that’s money she could have been getting at work that was now lost.  Going to court again would likely mean the same thing on another day.  She could have fought it, but $35 is still pretty measly for a fine.  What use is there paying for $10-$15 of gas plus a day’s wages for a court case that may not come out in your favor anyway, if right now you can pay this small $35 and be done with it?

Thus the title of this entry.  It seems to me that all these small fees, one for a rarely enforced law, and the other that seems formulated to stop people going to fight the good fight, are simply no better than taxes.  People pay them because they’re small and they simply cannot be bothered to fight them, given the economic disadvantage that might come with doing so.  The fact that my state is currently facing a $1 billion deficit certainly doesn’t make me want to think differently.

That said, it certainly wouldn’t surprise me to see more traffic stops like today’s in the coming months.

I just finished reading Michael van der Galien’s article here at Poligazette and at Hot Air’s Green Room on the Obama administration’s plans to spend over $100 billion from the stimulus bill on education reform.  I’ve also read Andrew J. Rotherham’s article at US News where he suggests the efforts the administration are putting forth are not enough:

The recent economic stimulus bill contains more than $100 billon in education spending, a historic investment equal to about 16 percent of the nation’s annual expenditures on public elementary and secondary schools

. In exchange, states are required to report more information about student performance and make “assurances” that they will work to improve schools. However, the law requires little in the way of actual changes.

Michael criticizes Rotherham:

Rothberg [sic] does not actually offer a solution – that would be taking responsibility and that is of course above the good man – but he implies that more government interference is the answer. [...]

[...] not more money nor government interference but less of both is needed to improve American schools. They suffer not from too little money and too few checks, but from a tremendous lack of competition. It has to become easier for parents to send their children to private schools: this will help those students receive a better education, and research shows it helps the public school they left behind improve as well, because teachers feel pressure to improve the quality of their work if they want to keep their students (and they do).

I agree with Rotherham that the bill doesn’t do enough to make actual reforms.  It’s basically a continuation of No Child Left Behind.  Money while collecting information does little to actually change anything.

However, I also agree with Michael that Rotherham doesn’t suggest any solutions himself.  Conversely, I disagree with Michael that school choice is the ultimate solution to the education problem.  The problems with education in America are multi-pronged and will require a multi-pronged solution of which school choice is just one part.

I have a couple problems with school choice.  The first: 306 million people.  As of this writing, that’s roughly the current estimate of the United States population.  If we were to close every public school tomorrow, as I know every purist libertarian would love to do, there are not enough private schools to take everybody.  It would take years, perhaps decades, to change the system to private, and I think they know it.  So most conservatives seem to prefer a hybrid private-public system, as we see with colleges and universities.

Problem number two involves cost.  While sending kids to parochial schools is often easy enough – some states partially or fully fund them – not everyone can the do other option: private schools.  So the conservative solution is vouchers.  The idea is that you’d be able to take your tax money that would normally be spent on public schools and apply it toward the private school.

Here’s the problem: A fully implemented voucher system isn’t going to pay for everything.  I mean, even in higher education, not even need-based financial aid does that.  Yes, initially it may pay it all for some people, but you’re still going to end up with student loans that must be paid back.  Private schools typically cost several or perhaps tens of thousand dollars per year.  With public schools, everyone contributes to the pool, which then gets distributed to school systems.  So nobody actually pays the full price for their own children.  Yes, you can use the tax money that would go toward the local public schools for private schools, but the parents will end up having to foot at least some of the bill.

I think conservatives need to realize that this is 2009, not 1789, or even the early 1800s.  Public schooling has been around for a long time.  It’s not going away, and saying “voucher, voucher, voucher” over and over is not going to change that.  Liberals, meanwhile, need to accept that school choice is a necessary component of reforming education.  It’s parents who should decide where their children go to school, not the state, and if the education a child is getting isn’t good enough, they should be allowed to go elsewhere.  Yet, it’s not going to cover everybody, and while the idea of competing schools spurring improvement in public schools is a great idea, improvement costs money.  It’s not just going to happen automatically.

At the same time, throwing money at the problem isn’t going to be what does it.  The attack must be multi-faceted.  I’m talking about teachers who actually know what they’re doing, and they should be paid through meritocratic means.  But there’s more.  The information they’re teaching needs to be up to date.  Even in my own home of Connecticut, “the richest state in the nation,” I’ve had textbooks from the ’70s, even the ’60s, in my earlier years.  So some of the science or history that was well known in the outside world while I was in primary school was not actually correct in the books I was reading.  Only years later did I learn the real facts.

Then there are districts that need more help than others, so yes, money will have to be spent, if only to give them better texts.  It’s secondhand knowledge, but a friend of a friend started work at a New York City school full of underprivileged children a couple years ago.  From my understanding, the school was (and probably still is) a mess.  That’s the kind of district that needs the most help.

So I think the biggest task is going to be deciding where that $100 billion needs to go the most.  It is here that all that great information gathered by the No Child Left Behind mandate can be used.  The government knows the schools that are doing bad, so the money can be appropriated along those lines.  How does the federal government decide how much money is needed for certain districts?  That’s the part that needs to be left up the individual states.  They should be instructed to come up with a plan to help those struggling districts, along with how much money they’ll need to do it.

Now, I’m not saying that they’ll have to submit these plans to the federal government for approval.  This would be the wrong way to go about things, since every state will have certain areas where their students need to improve.  Yet, they’ll need to have a plan in order to figure out how much money is required.  After all, $100 billion is a small part of the overall budget, and it’ll need to be spread around to all the struggling districts.  Therefore, the plans should be cost effective.  Maybe not every student is going to get their own textbook, but something is better than nothing.

I believe that to fix all the problems in the public school system, much more than $100 billion is going to be needed.  Yet more importantly it’s going to take time.  It’s something that might take a decade or more, and that’s only if the country actually gets serious about it.  It’ll take longer to complete the task if they don’t.  Since we all know how serious politicians actually are in daily life, other options must be considered.  School choice is one of those options.  If parent’s are unhappy with the education their child is getting, they should be able to pull their child out of that school system and put them somewhere else.  Vouchers are a decent application of that goal.  Perhaps if more and more children start going to private schools it will force states and the federal government to pay attention to the problems facing public schools.

However, because private schools are simply not within reach for some families, we cannot simply ignore our public schools, and hope that they will simply fix themselves if more and more students leave the system.  Competition quickly becomes rather one-sided if an entity doesn’t have money to make the improvements it needs to become better.  So money must be spent on public schools to improve what instructional materials they have, but teachers also must be good as well.  An accurate textbook will only take students so far, after all.

Reforming education must not be made victim to one-track thinking from either side of the political spectrum because no one solution is the answer.  In the end, it’s going to take an all-of-the-above approach to keep America on track with the other countries of the world.

In Michael’s article on the Specter cross-over, regular reader c3 asks:

Just for the sake of discussion.  How is this different than what Joe Leiberman did?

I think what’s different between Specter and Lieberman is that, as far as I know, Lieberman hasn’t flipped-flopped between saying one thing and then doing another, while Specter has.  Yes, Lieberman himself flirted with the idea of becoming a Republican once upon a time, and was John McCain’s first pick for running mate last year, but he hadn’t spent months telling us that it would never happen and then suddenly did it.  I actually found Lieberman to be quite transparent with his thought process.  He went public with the fact he was considering it.

Specter is a different animal altogether.

There may have been signs, I don’t know.  I didn’t have the behind the scenes knowledge so many people apparently had.  I guess the “writing was on the wall,” even though bad poll numbers are no sure indication you’ll cross over.  But according to Interested in the other article, once, “In 2001 When the Vermont Republican Jim Jeffords became an independent, Specter lost a committee chairmanship in the Senate’s resulting power shift. An angry Specter proposed a ban on such party switches.”

And then there’s this from last month:

I am staying a Republican because I think I have an important role, a more important role, to play there. The United States very desperately needs a two-party system. That’s the basis of politics in America. I’m afraid we are becoming a one-party system, with Republicans becoming just a regional party with so little representation of the northeast or in the middle atlantic. I think as a governmental matter, it is very important to have a check and balance. That’s a very important principle in the operation of our government. In the constitution on Separation of powers.

Meanwhile, Specter has apparently been in talks with Biden for several years about doing this, and particularly in the last few months.  Neither are bad at face value – as I said, Lieberman was wooed by the Republicans running up to the election, and after – but Specter acted as if everything was peachy.  Then this pops up.  That’s not very honest.

So did both men leave their party for to try and survive politically?  Yes.  Was one of them more transparant in their inentions.  You bet.*

On a side note, I can’t take seriously any argument that Arlen Specter “betrayed the Republican Party” when many were more than willing to welcome Lieberman into the fold (as a Senator).  However, if any also opposed Lieberman’s admission, very well.  Good for you.  That’s called consistency.  But if you’re angry about Specter after supporting the wooing of Lieberman, I call that hypocrisy.

I think in the coming months we’ll see how Specter is welcomed among the Democrats.  Probably about as well as Lieberman would have been among the Republicans.  Which means not too well.

*Disclosure: Lieberman is one of my Senators, so if there’s any bias, it’s not intentional.

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I wasn’t raised with any religious guidance and that’s how I live my life today.  Day-to-day, I’m an atheist.  I don’t live my life in a religious way and see no reason to do so.  However, philosophically, I’m an agnostic.  I believe that the question of a deity’s existence or non-existence cannot, and may never be proven.  It’s this mix of atheism and agnosticism that allows me to believe that both religious and atheist alike should (civilly) debate the issue, based on well thought-out argument.  It’s also this mix that makes me believe that both parties should just accept the other’s way of life.  Debate on it, sure, but don’t harp on and ridicule people for their belief.  This, I believe, is the wrong way to approach things.

I’ve participated in many religion-based debates between atheists and theists.  I feel I have at least a basic understanding of the Old Testament and the New Testament, and some of the core principles of Christianity.  Yet, my religious education is lacking.  This is my own fault; I’ve never read the Bible (though I have a book of stories from it).  Well, at least, not cover to cover.  This is odd for me since my fascination with religion knows no bounds.

So, I’m remedying this situation.  From Amazon today came a copy of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, complete with the Apocrypha (the Deuterocanical Books, including the Books of Maccabee).  I know that even a reading of the Bible won’t make me understand all of, say, Catholic or Methodist teachings, but it’s a start.  After the Bible, I’ll continue on with the Book of Mormon (a copy is already in my possession).  After that will come other scriptural texts.

And no, I don’t intend on seeing my own personal beliefs change.  This is academic for me.  I wish to understand more about religion, so I’m going straight to the source.  My goal is to become as knowledgeable as possible; at least enough to be able to hold up my end in a truly theological debate.  Most of what I’ve debated so far has skirted around the edges of hardcore theology.  Obviously, such an endeavor to understand religion is the work of a life time.

I have no problem with that.

Which leads me to this blog.  It’s been gathering a lot of dust since I joined Poligazette.  I had hoped to transform it into discussion of my profession, video, where I’d discuss the latest in the field and give some useful tips on video filming and editing.  I still hope to have some of this material here, but it’s been slow to come, seeing as how my first post related to editing was made only late last month.  I’d also hoped to showcase other works, such as writings and video material.  However, I haven’t done much creative writing as of late (and that which I’ve done I can’t show as it’s for work).  I haven’t gotten a copy of Adobe CS4 yet, so video material won’t be here for a while.  Eventually, though, I hope to find time to do all this.  Whatever I can squeeze in between work and writing about politics, I guess.

Yet, this new project of mine provides a perfect opportunity for re-invigoration of this blog.  As I go through my religious studies, I can make some commentary on the text I am currently reading.  I’m not sure how often I’ll be able to do it.  Perhaps once a week, but I’m not going to set a solid goal.  I’ll just let them come naturally.

So, on to the studies!

More change in Washington, I see.

Yea, I’m in the dissent on this one, but not because I’m some rabid always-blame-Israel anti-semite.

The thing is that the Obama administration was supposed to be the team of rivals.  In some ways it is.  He placed the more hawkish Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, and brought in a bunch of old Bush 41 hands as advisers.  Robert Gates served the last president.  And the guy who would have been Freeman’s boss, Dennis Blair, well, I don’t recall seeing any issues brought up about him.  Blair supported Freeman, too.

Okay, so we have all the people the Republicans like, or at least, can accept.  But where is the voice from the other side?  The people who may not be in complete agreement with everything Israel does, or may not believe China is Satan incarnate.  You won’t find these people part of the foreign policy team, or at least not in a way that they publicly state dissenting positions.  Because in the U.S. government, Israel is always supported, no matter what; China is generally opposed (except for trade); and Saudi Arabia holds the distinction of being both ally and the country from which most of the 9/11 hijackers came.

I certainly don’t agree with a lot of Freeman’s positions, especially a lot of the stuff he was saying after 9/11.  Freeman is also off base that the American government wouldn’t accept a mass protest in the nation’s capital – since it happens all the time.  I’m just saying that I don’t think a Freeman appointment to the NIC would have been the end of the world, since he was already vastly outnumbered by the hawks around him.

Speaking of which…for those who say his views would have affected his ability to view things objectively: so an ardently pro-Israel and anti-PRC viewpoint would have been objective?

Liberals are shocked!  Shocked, I tell you.  Why?  Well, a recent Supreme Court concurring opinion to a ruling that will allow patients to sue drug companies for injuries related to the drugs was written by none other than Clarence Thomas, that avowedly conservative justice.

Of course, without even having to read his opinion, this LA Times article tells you all you need to know about why Thomas supported the right to sue.  In short, he supports state law:

Four years ago, for example, the court, with Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy in the majority, upheld the power of federal agents to raid the homes of Californians who grow marijuana for their personal use — legal under state law but not federal law. Thomas disagreed. [...]

“If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything,” Thomas wrote in dissent. ” . . . Our federalist system, properly understood, allows California and a growing number of other states to decide for themselves how to safeguard the health and welfare of their citizens.”

Basically, Thomas is a federalist, a supporter of limited federal government interference into state affairs.  So, knowing this, his concurrence with the majority isn’t so surprising.

Clarence hasn’t suddenly turned into a business-hating liberal.  His position here is the conservative one.  I suppose the more important question is: why didn’t the other conservative justices rule this way?

By the way, it’s important to note that Thomas didn’t join in the majority opinion.  He thought it overreached:

In particular, I have become in-creasingly skeptical of this Court’s “purposes and objectives” pre-emption jurisprudence. Under this approach,the Court routinely invalidates state laws based on perceived conflicts with broad federal policy objectives, legislative history, or generalized notions of congressionalpurposes that are not embodied within the text of federal law. Because implied pre-emption doctrines that wanderfar from the statutory text are inconsistent with the Constitution, I concur only in the judgment.

If Congress had written a law barring state lawsuits against drug companies in the area this lawsuit covered, Thomas would have been in the dissent.

There has been some concern, and rightly so I think, that the late night comedians: the Jon Stewarts, Stephen Colberts, and David Lettermans of the world would fail to criticize and satirize the new President once he got into office.  Jazz Shaw, writing for Pajamas Media, thinks that although the pace has been slow to pick up, the funnies at the expense of the new President are starting to appear:

Were they frightened? Had they simply spent so long attacking the Republicans that the idea of criticizing a Democratic president was beyond the scope of imagination? Or were they truly liberal, partisan hacks as so many of their critics had suggested? Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton were still being abused on a regular basis and the never-ending tale of Blago was a movable feast for all, but the digs at President Obama failed to appear. Instead, Stewart pilloried Fox News for having the audacity to criticize the White House and Letterman ripped into Michael Steele’s rocky start as RNC chairman. My hopes for bipartisan comedy goodness began to fade.

That may have begun to change this week, however. The first encouraging sign came when Stephen Colbert examined Obama’s new health care initiative and expressed his hopes that it would “cover him for the stroke he was going to have when he filed his tax return.” There may have been some veiled cynicism in that critique, but the real breakthrough came on The Daily Show when Jon Stewart heard about Obama’s plans for Iraq over the next few years. After railing against the war since before it began, this was clearly a bridge too far and Stewart came out swinging.

A few things that Jazz wrote at the end of his article make me think he’s hoping for a little much.

I don’t know what party Stewart belongs to (though my research suggests he’s a left-leaning Independent), but Colbert is a confirmed Democrat, and the end of the campaign made it fairly clear what party Letterman supports (though he’s always – with the exception of that one incident last year – been cordial with John McCain).  Jazz suggests that more hits on universal healthcare, like the one done briefly by Colbert the other night, will bring a 180 in the comedy on late night TV.

I think the late-nighters will become more comfortable with criticizing and making fun of the Obama administration as time goes on, but on their own terms and political outlook.  Though, they have made some surprising moves.  Stewart will take whatever chance he gets to make fun of media excesses, no matter the politics of the publisher in question.  And on one Colbert Report episode last year, Colbert appeared to argue in support of the smorgasbord approach to energy that is not generally favored by Democrats, but Republicans.

My original aim of improving my understanding of Western philosophy has been realized. Though I don’t write on theology or the philosophy of religion, my study of the Bible has significantly shaped my thinking about a number of issues in the areas of philosophy on which I do write. Over the years, however, that original aim has come to be supplemented by other reasons for my avocation as a Biblical scholar. Such an avocation not only improves one’s understanding of Western philosophy, but also greatly enhances one’s understanding of Western culture more broadly. While the Bible has heavily influenced many philosophers, it has likewise heavily influenced countless artists and writers and composers (among others). Some of the richness of Western art and literature and music is lost on anyone who does not possess a good knowledge of the Bible.

Kramer makes a good point.  One of my history professors in college would often say that the history of Western society is the history of religion, and largely framed his class that way.  And when you consider the influence of the Christian church on Western society, you can see it to be true.  Even the more secular developments coming on after the Reformation can be seen as influenced by religion.  Basically, Luther’s and Calvin’s ideas ended up leading to people thinking about governing themselves rather than being the subject of a monarch.

There are a few things in the speech (this post was transposed from it) that believers may cringe at, but it’s well worth the read.

My favorite quote:

However, unlike some atheists and most agnostics, I am hardly uninterested in God and religion.

Though I am in practice an atheist and in philosophy an agnostic, I’ve always been fascinated by religion.  Don’t ask me why this is for I do not know.  So, I could myself among those who am with Kramer in his interest.

I am admittedly fairly behind in my study.  As in, not very far at all.  But this article has promoted me to take action.  So I’ll be getting a copy of the Bible soon.  After that, I’ll get into other texts.  I actually already have a copy of the Book of Mormon (I wasn’t raised one, it came into my family’s possession some time ago).  It’ll be a process, but hopefully within a couple years, I’ll feel a lot more knowledgeable than I do now.  Not enough to match people like Kramer, of course, but hopefully I’ll have a decent enough understanding of them all to consider myself dangerous.