Interesting Magazines.

Yesterday, I received 3 magazines in the mail: The New Republic, The Nation and The American Conservative. I also subscribe to Scientific American, but I need to be fresh when I read that magazine. The others I can read just before bedtime.

The latest issue of the American Conservative has an interesting cover: it is a photo of Hillary Clinton’s face that has been defaced with black ink (goatee and devil’s horns drawn on) and the title is something to the effect of “The Limits of Hillary Hating”. The thesis of the article is that conservatives had better bring more to the plate that Hillary bashing if they want to have a chance of winning in 2008.

The article (and the cover photo) is not yet up on their website.

Speaking of the Democratic nomination, Obama supporters are getting letters which are asking for specific amounts (probably based on what you’ve given in the past). Evidently being outraised last quarter stung a bit, though Obama has many more grassroots donors.

I’d say this to Senator Obama: “sir, if I had that much money, I’d probably be a Republican!!!” (ok, NOT! ) But you get my drift.

Of course, the fact that I accept the scientific explanation of how things came into being probably disqualifies me from being a Republican!

The three Republican presidential candidates who indicated last month that they do not believe in evolution may have been taking a safe stance on the issue when it comes to appealing to GOP voters.

A Gallup poll released Monday said that while the country is about evenly split over whether the theory of evolution is true, Republicans disbelieve it by more than 2-to-1.

Republicans saying they don’t believe in evolution outnumbered those who do by 68 percent to 30 percent in the survey. Democrats believe in evolution by 57 percent to 40 percent, as do independents by a 61 percent to 37 percent margin.

The poll also said that those who go to church often are far likelier to reject evolution than those who do not.

Speaking of Republicans and my magazines, The New Republic had excellent articles on Jeri Thompson (Fred Thompson’s cleavage showing wife)

and Mitt Romney.

About Ms. Thompson (shown in her new “cleaned up image”)

Back in 2000, the dishy young Republican operative, then 33, had Washington wags atwitter over her high-profile quest to capture the famously footloose Fred Thompson. Divorced from his high school sweetheart in 1985, the senator and erstwhile actor, then 57, had become one of the hottest tickets in town. A deep- drawling, broad-shouldered six-and-half footer, Thompson had a devastating Southern charm, with a gilding of movie-star glamour. Country music bombshell Lorrie Morgan, cosmetics queen Georgette Mosbacher, conservative pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, and Time columnist Margaret Carlson were among Hollywood Fred’s better-known, better-heeled paramours.

Photo Courtesy Scott Olson/Getty ImagesKehn (pronounced “keen”), by contrast, was neither rich nor famous. A Midwestern gal of modest means, she had met the older, more established Thompson on July 4, 1996, in a Kroger check-out line in Nashville. Two years later, she moved to Washington to try her hand at political work and to pursue their relationship. But, while Kehn impressed Beltway types with her quick grasp of their culture, few gave her much chance of realizing her romantic aims. Thompson had never been known as a one-woman man–not even during his early, still-married days as a fledgling lobbyist living alone in Washington while his first wife, Sarah, raised their three kids back in Nashville. One of Fred’s old flames from his pre-divorce era recalls with a laugh that she was not Thompson’s only paramour at the time of their involvement and observes that good ol’ Fred (with whom she stayed friendly post-romance) has always been something of a Clintonesque bad boy with the ladies. Once he and Sarah split, Thompson’s romantic life approached the status of Washington legend. As he chuckled to Hill Republicans earlier this year, “I was single for a long time, and, yep, I chased a lot of women. And a lot of women chased me. And those that chased me tended to catch me.” The swinging senator was considered unlikely to settle down again with any one woman–much less a mid-level party operative from Naperville, Illinois, no matter how young and fetching.

So, Old Fred wasn’t lazy about everything! The article goes on to argue that her talent lay in selling ideas, even not-so-easy-to-sell ones. She reminds me a bit of the textbook representatives that are sent to the technical faculty to sell their books. They are almost always women who, well, kind of look like Jeri Thompson! Frankly, I find these reps to be a pain in the neck, and I almost always am brusque with them. I don’t curse them or anything, but I make it clear that I have better things to do with my time than talk to them, unless I have solicited a book from them.

But I digress. What role does she play now-a-days?

as Fred’s proto-campaign began to congeal and the stakes began to rise, the stories about Jeri became more concrete and less adorable. She was mucking around in the details too much. She distrusted Thompson’s “testing the waters” chief Tom Collamore, and so all campaign decisions had to pass through her. In early July, the semi-implosion of rival John McCain’s effort, featuring accusations of profligate spending, unnerved the Thompsons, prompting Jeri to further tighten her grip. No one could be hired, nothing could be purchased, and no event could be scheduled without her nod. Over the next two months, the still-unofficial campaign saw heavy staff turnover (Collamore, research director J.T. Mastranadi, the entire communications department …), with more than one departee (few of whom wished to speak on the record for this piece) citing troubles with Jeri. The week of Fred’s long-anticipated announcement on September 4, snarky quotes surfaced in the press about how some female staffers had dubbed the campaign “The Devil Wears Prada II,” likening Jeri’s volatile temperament, demanding nature, and couture consciousness to those of the tyrannical fashion-magazine editor played by Meryl Streep in the 2006 film. (Campaign aides tend to take greater umbrage at getting chewed out by the candidate’s wife than by your garden-variety boss.) “You never know how she’s going to be every day,” a source told the Capitol Hill weekly Roll Call. “When she clacks her high heels in the hallway, [staffers] all go scrambling” to get out of her path.

Gee, what a shock! But to be fair, Jeri Thompson has nicer boobs than Meryl Streep.

The New Republic’s article on Romney is also worth reading. The article is more about how Romney comes across than anything else. I loved this little passage:

Romney’s analytical style is hands-down his most compelling attribute. It’s what made him successful as a management consultant and private-equity-fund manager. And it’s what most distinguishes him from the man he’d like to succeed (though both hold MBAs from Harvard). But management consulting isn’t the most obvious preparation for life on the campaign trail. Later, we show up at a diner in Derry where Rudy Giuliani stopped the day before. Romney can look less like a flesh-pressing candidate in these situations than like a video of a candidate that’s being fast-forwarded. At one point, a hunter in an orange baseball cap asks about global warming. Romney doesn’t so much answer the question as strafe him with bullet points: Nuclear powerclean coalefficient vehicles liquefied coalsolarwindethanol biodiesel. Romney is talking even faster now than during the Q&A setting, as if to compensate for the relative inefficiency of one-on-one campaigning.

(emphasis mine). That is what Romney reminds me of: a mixture of a hyperactive borg and a slick insurance salesman. It is almost as if he comes across as a machine with no human feelings at all. When he speaks, I get the feeling that I am being conned. Hey, if you were to mix Romney and Thompson (Mr. Lazy) together you’d get a normal person.

Religion: some Christians don’t get it, AT ALL. In fact, they will never be able to. From the Friendly Atheist:

Dr. Roger Olson, a professor of theology at Baylor University, attacks atheism (but not atheists) in an opinion piece for The Lariat newspaper:

We have to recognize atheists’ full freedom to believe God does not exist, but we don’t have to embrace atheism as a social good. In fact, I would argue that atheism has no redeeming social value.

Atheism undermines values. How? Let’s look at care for others. Yes, an individual atheist might care for other people. But when have you heard of an entire atheist organization serving the poor, the sick or the hungry?

…

For [Baylor and universities like it] atheism is not benign, but the enemy — even if atheists themselves are not.

Finally, let me repeat that I have nothing against atheists as persons and neither does Baylor University.

But in my opinion, they are people of character and virtue in spite of their philosophy of life — not because of it.

He is completely wrong, of course. As I’ve pointed out repeatedly, the elite scientists are overwhelmingly atheistic. It is the atheistic mindset (at least in the laboratory) that leads to discoveries; saying “oh, god did it that way” just isn’t good enough.

As to his statement: “But when have you heard of an entire atheist organization serving the poor, the sick or the hungry?”

Ok, we don’t rally around atheism to do our good works. Instead we volunteer for organizations that are built around the task to be done (soup kitchens, maternity homes for teens, civil rights organizations, charities) rather than are built around some sort of faith, though I should also point out that many atheists belong to Unitarian Universalist congregations which have charity groups.

And I’ll ask this “professor” this: how many atheist groups organize to fly planes into buildings, to force female circumcision, or get involved in religious rioting? How many atheist groups issue death sentences against authors? How many atheist groups work to deny basic human rights to homosexuals, or to deny reproductive rights to women?

Remember sir, that where you live, your compatriots used to lynch African Americans on Saturdays, then go to church on Sundays, and proclaim that your god made you the rightful “superiors” of those of us with darker skins.