Back to Politics…

Above: Obama in St. Louis (via the Daily Kos). Compare that to the McCain rally I attended (2000-3000 people) a week ago…

Ah, beautiful day, an 8 mile trail run under my belt, a good football game on TV (Northwestern leads Purdue 24-12 at the half; there were two touchdowns in the last 90 seconds of the first half), and I have my laptop.

So now for some politics

Essay on how we choose who we vote for.

I spoke about a fight that I had with a friend. I ended up going to her party, but our relationship will never be the same.

But this is what baffled me more than anything: this person “Ms. V”, hates George W. Bush and likes Hillary Clinton. So this Presidential vote should be a no-brainer, right? Well, not so much.

Ok, but this is what got me: she likes Sarah Palin, who is, to me, the polar opposite to Hillary Clinton! Not only do they disagree on almost every issue, but HRC is an accomplished intellectual. Sarah Palin has open contempt for intellectuals.

So what gives? Yes, both are females who have had some political success but that is where the similarities end…or do they end there?

I had to think about that and then I remembered this:

She talks about the “invisible” person.

Then here is Sarah Palin:

Now, who opposed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries?

Obama supporters…slammed as “eggheads” and African Americans:

(note: check out “eggheads for Obama”)

And Sarah Palin is slammed for being an idiot. Frankly, even some Republicans have at least admitted that she (Palin) isn’t up to the job.

So in both cases, we have a female candidate that isn’t be backed by a majority of the intellectual community (though the Paul Krugman, who just won a Nobel in economics, backed Hillary Clinton and now supports Obama).

Bottom line: you have someone with self-esteem problems backing someone (or considering backing someone) while whining about those “elitists”. Here is an example of this. “Obama and his elitist friends”???? Oh barf…give this person a hanky.

But I think that this is is sometimes the case; people vote a certain way because they get their feelings hurt.

Personally, I like it that we have a smart person at the top of the ticket and I love it that 61 Nobel Prize winners in science have endorsed him.

I love it that world class scientists such as Francis Collins have endorsed Obama. (Collins is famous for mapping the human genome and for being an outspoken Christian)

But in our “shit for brains” “intelligence is bad” society where average people think that they are just as smart as Nobel Laureates in science (the latter are often derided by the ignorant as being “book smart”), well, the Nobel Laureate endorsement is seen as being vastly inferior to being endorsed by an entertainer or athlete. In fact, some see it as being a slight negative. (scroll down to see the poll).

Note: The Daily Kos (where I hang out) has 79.7 percent of its members having at least an undergraduate degree and 41.6 having graduate degrees and, in terms of religion, 43.2 percent atheist or agnostic and many more highly non-traditional. Many of them liked the endorsement by the scientists but most were realistic enough to know that it would have little effect.

Atheism: hard to get any sort of a movement going.

From the time last spring that Jeanette Norman first heard of Amendment 48 in Colorado, she simmered with the desire to do something about it.

Conservative Christians and their allies had collected more than 100,000 signatures to put the measure on the Nov. 4 ballot. If enacted, it would define human life as beginning at the moment of conception, essentially turning abortion into murder without the need of overturning the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade.

As an atheist, Ms. Norman felt indignant about what she considered an intrusion of religious dogma into public policy. So she decided to hold a rally of like-minded nonbelievers, who might variously describe themselves as atheists, humanists, freethinkers or secularists. By various polls, such people accounted for nearly one-quarter of Colorado’s citizens.

So you probably know the rest of this story: she put in the work, go the permit and….hardly anyone showed up. Click on the link to see the story.

So what gives? Here is my uneducated guesses:

1. If one had a tendency to rally around others and follow their lead, one would probably be a theist. On the average, atheists don’t like being told what to do or being told what issue to back or how to back it.

2. In terms of numbers, we are quite small compared to the others, and remember that only a small percentage of a group shows up to do the “heavy lifting”. Now when you have a small percentage of a small percentage….

3. Atheism is hard to rally around as it is really a rejection of a popular belief. In my case, it means that “I don’t see any evidence of the existence of a deity” though I’d be willing to change my mind should convincing evidence show up. I’ve seen absolutely zero explanations from religion.

4. We are still seen as “evil” by large, large sections of the population at large. While I am pleased that we are grossly overrepresented at the higher intellectual levels the average Joe or Jane sees us, at best, as “defiant” and, at worst, “evil”. Support from us is seen as toxic to a political candidate.

What, for the Elizabeth Dole re-election campaign, began as a profitable fundraising letter, is now a full-fledged campaign. Dole now seeks to defeat her opponent, Kay Hagan, by accusing Hagan of talking with atheists, humanists, and other undesirables. (See Friendly Atheist: Republicans Smear Senate Candidate Kay Hagan for Meeting with Atheists.)

Let’s be clear about what Hagan’s crime is here, according to Dole. Hagan is not being criticized for agreeing with any particular set of positions. Dole is condemning Hagan for the crime of merely talking to atheists, scularists, and the like. Not only are we wrong – we do not even have a right to present our case to those who may be our elected officials.

Even my favorite Presidential candidate (ever!) gently chided us to quit complaining about religious language being used to talk about morals in public policy.

And that is why that, if we truly hope to speak to people where they’re at – to communicate our hopes and values in a way that’s relevant to their own – then as progressives, we cannot abandon the field of religious discourse. Because when we ignore the debate about what it means to be a good Christian or Muslim or Jew; when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our obligations towards one another; when we shy away from religious venues and religious broadcasts because we assume that we will be unwelcome – others will fill the vacuum, those with the most insular views of faith, or those who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends. In other words, if we don’t reach out to evangelical Christians and other religious Americans and tell them what we stand for, then the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons and Alan Keyeses will continue to hold sway. More fundamentally, the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms. Some of the problem here is rhetorical – if we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice. Imagine Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address without reference to “the judgments of the Lord.” Or King’s I Have a Dream speech without references to “all of God’s children.” Their summoning of a higher truth helped inspire what had seemed impossible, and move the nation to embrace a common destiny. Our failure as progressives to tap into the moral underpinnings of the nation is not just rhetorical, though. Our fear of getting “preachy” may also lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in some of our most urgent social problems. After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness – in the imperfections of man. Solving these problems will require changes in government policy, but it will also require changes in hearts and a change in minds. I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturers’ lobby – but I also believe that when a gang-banger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd because he feels somebody disrespected him, we’ve got a moral problem. There’s a hole in that young man’s heart – a hole that the government alone cannot fix.

In fact, because I do not believe that religious people have a monopoly on morality, I would rather have someone who is grounded in morality and ethics, and who is also secular, affirm their morality and ethics and values without pretending that they’re something they’re not. They don’t need to do that. None of us need to do that. But what I am suggesting is this – secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King – indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history – were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity.

Joe Biden talked about our being a “Nation under God” (which one?)

I agree that the “pro-America part of the country” remark by Sarah Palin was absurd but Biden went on to say:

“Ladies and gentlemen, I have never been to a state that hasn’t sent its sons and daughters to serve its country,” Biden said in Mesilla as the crowd of about 2,000 booed Palin’s reported comments. “It doesn’t matter where you live, we all love this country. And I hope it gets through that one of the reasons why Barack (Obama) and I are running is that we know how damaging the policy of division … has been.

“We are one nation, under God, indivisible,” Biden shouted to the crowd. “We are all patriotic, we all love this country.”

In fact, if there were an “atheists for Obama” club, I’d join but limit my work to stuff that kept a low profile. I certainly wouldn’t wear a button like this one (except among my mathematics and science friends).

The best I can hope for is a candidate that strongly respects a secular approach to government and for an advance in culture to where it becomes ok to question some of the kookier claims made by religion (which is one reason I liked the film Religulous)

The current race
Desperate Republicans attempt to conflate voter registration fraud (making fraudulent registrations) with voting fraud (illegal voting). Here is yet another article about this:

At TPMmuckraker at the moment, we’re giving a very close look to the ‘voter fraud’ claims in Wisconsin that Karl Rove was so interested in. GOP activists were incredibly disappointed and angry when the US Attorney in Milwaukee brought only a tiny handful of prosecutions, after the activists had charged a massive conspiracy to steal the 2004 elections from Republicans. But the government actually lost a stunningly high percentage of even those cases because they were so weak.

Cynthia C. Alicea, 25, was indicted for double-voting. The evidence was that election officials found she’d registered to vote twice. She was acquited because it turned out election officials told her to fill out another card because the first one had been filled out wrong. Pretty lurid stuff. There was no evidence she’d ever voted twice. The other three people indicted in Milwaukee for double voting were acquited too.

Out of the tiny number of bona fide voter fraud cases, the great majority fall into two categories. The first are cases where workers hired in voter registration drives appear to sign up non-existent people to get paid more money from the sponsors of the drive. The actual examples of this are exceedingly rare. But since the people don’t exist, no one ever shows up to vote in their name.

Note: this is voter registration fraud; this is what happened at some of the ACORN drives.

The second are felons or parolees who either register to vote or actually vote, in most cases not knowing they’re not eligible to vote. [...]

Republican party officials and elected officials use bogus claims of vote fraud to do three things: 1) to stymie voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts in poor and minority neighborhoods, 2) purge voter rolls of legitimate voters and 3) institute voter ID laws aimed at making it harder for low-income and minority voters to vote.

This sounds like hyperbole but it is simply the truth. (A great example of this in microcosm was the 2002 senate election in South Dakota — Johnson v. Thune — in which Republicans spent the entire election ranting about a massive voter fraud conspiracy on the state’s Indian reservations, charges which turned out to be completely bogus but had the aim of keeping voting down on the reservations. You can find much more on this in the TPM archives. Go to the search feature and type in some combinatin of ‘fraud south dakota’ etc. I’ll try to write more recapping the story soon.)

The tie-in with the US Attorney story is that the White House and the Republican National Committee have used the power of the Department of Justice to accomplish those three goals that I outlined above. Only most of the relatively non-partisan and professional US Attorneys simply didn’t find any actual fraud. Choosing not to indict people on bogus charges got at least two of the US Attorneys (Iglesias and McKay) fired.

In fact, the number of proven voter fraud cases are tiny.

For more:

Republicans: still engaging in wishful thinking.

While we don’t know the impact of the last debate, the polling indicates that McCain has been able to close the gap with Obama markedly in the past week.

Realclearpolitics.com lists six polls with a field date ending on 10-13. Their average gave Obama a margin of 8.3%. There are seven subsequent surveys with a field date ending on 10-16 and their average is an Obama lead of 5.1. [...]

This race is far, far from over!

People who believe this can put their money where their mouth is:
Iowa Electronic: Democrats 86.9, Republicans 13.7
Intrade: Republicans 86.0, Republicans 15.8

Go for it!

Oh yeah, there is the pollster.com data too.

Current graphic.

Then there are scenes like this one:

For more on Obama’s St. Louis rally, go here.
Bonus: Remember the Reporter who was assaulted at the Palin Rally? This is his story from his blog.

Farmdale 8 mile trail run

Farmdale Trail Run

I feel a bit guilty as the ultra types (many of them, anyway) are still out there slugging it out. Last year, I was out for about 9:30. But this year, I wasn’t even remotely ready (taking the half-year off) and so I entered the 8 miler and attempted to run it.

My time was 1:30:53; the distance was just over 8 miles. Though I didn’t feel that tired afterward, I am feeling it right now.

More details: this race consists of a mix of dirt single track, leaf covered single track (a few roots, but not many), a bit of grass and some jeep road. There were a few very shallow water crossings, some good hills and a small amount of tacky mud. I’d say that it was 100 percent runnable.

The day was sunny and in the low 40’s (4-5 C). I didn’t notice any wind.

I got there a little bit early and said hi to a few friends. I noticed one of the ladies (a former “nearly elite” runner who is a national caliber off-road triathlete); she was wearing very tight spandex leggings. Have you ever seen those statues that those Greek artists carved (e. g. David)? Well, she looked like a female version of that; her butt and legs looked as if they were carved from marble.

Most of us (myself included) don’t have the DNA to look like that.

I lined up about 2/3 of the way back (which wasn’t back far enough) and got into a rhythm right away. About 3-4 minutes into it we hit the single track portion and I just enjoyed being able to stay slow. I admit that I spent much of the time looking down as the footing could be tricky at times given that I haven’t made it out to the trails very much.

Still, things went ok and I didn’t have to walk though I chose to walk a couple of the longer hills.

The first aid station came at about 44 minutes (4 miles) and I felt ok with it; by that time I had met up with someone named “Paula”; we had run together just a bit at a June 10K trail race. We chatted a bit as we continued on.

At about 1 hour she started to pull away (so I thought) and I told her that I was fading. But somehow, the next uphill rejuvenated me.

After the last aid station we entered some single track and some of the faster 32 mile runners caught me (they had extra loops to do as their first loop was just under 11 miles). These folks were just so impressive to me; they had a light, quick turnover.

But then a couple of 8 mile runners caught me; clearly I was lollygagging. I told myself “I can run faster than this” and so I did; I picked it up dramatically and actually caught a couple of people in the last mile. We crossed the top of a dam and then went up a small hill (singletrack) and then down until the opening.

Afterward, I had a small meal, talked to friends, and cheered on some of the ultra runners who were finishing their first (of 3) loops.

Special Shout out Jerry Davidson, who has lost 80 pounds and had entered the 32 miler in hopes of finishing two loops. As I drove away he was closing in on loop one and looked good.

Short History of Negative Political Ads: via 3quarksdaily

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Media Matters – Radio host Bob Grant asserted that Obama created an ” ‘O’ flag,” but apparent flag in question was Ohio’s

You can’t make this up…

Grant did not further elaborate on what he meant by the ” ‘O’ flag.” However, conservative blogger Michelle Malkin stated on October 13 that she had “received several e-mails today from readers complaining about Barack Obama’s backdrop in Toledo today. Apparently, some talk show hosts have also gone ballistic over what they think is an ‘Obama flag.’ ” But, as Malkin noted, the flag appearing behind Obama during his October 13 speech was actually the Ohio state flag.

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A Bit of Science: TED talk on Particle Physics

Of course, the talk includes some cool physics and mathematics (by the way, what he calls “Lee” groups is spelled “Lie Groups”).

And I should say that I envy this guy’s lifestyle; this envy became especially great as I graded my “calculus for applications” (aka “business calculus”) class examinations.

Oh well; it is a good thing for all of us that people who are as smart as this guy are doing the research.

Second to Last Friday Before the Election

Some humor A 60 second take on the last Presidential debate.

What is the state of the race?

Election Futures:
Intrade has it 85.6-14.5 in favor for Obama, and Iowa Electronic has it 87.5-14.10 for Obama.

See FiveThirtyEight.com for a list of the polls.

Of course, there is some weirdness. Evidently, a few weeks ago, someone tried to skew the Intrade election future prices.

And of course, the Republicans are trying to cry “voter fraud”. Let’s be clear: there is voter registration fraud (someone registering fake voters) and voter fraud (someone voting illegally) and these two are very different things.

As far as the Acorn flap:

The idea that Democrats try to win elections by arranging for hordes of nonexistent people with improbable names to vote for them has long been a favorite theme of Rove-era Republicans. Now it’s become a desperate obsession. [...]

During this election cycle, the Times reported today, ACORN has deployed thirteen thousand mostly paid workers, who have registered 1.3 million new voters. One or two per cent of these workers turned in sheaves of forms that they filled out themselves with fake names and bogus addresses, and, even though at least a hundred of these workers have already been fired, the forged forms have been submitted to election boards.

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that groups like ACORN are required by law to submit them, even if they’re obvious fakes. This is to prevent funny business, such as trashing forms that look like they might be Republican (or Democratic, as the case may be).

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that ACORN normally sorts through forms, flags those that look fishy, and submits the fishy ones in a separate pile for the convenience of election officials.

Sounds suspicious—until you reflect that the motivation of the misbehaving registration workers is almost always to look like they’ve been doing more work than they really have, and that the victim of the “fraud” is actually the organization they’re working for.

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that even if one of these fake forms results in a nonexistent person actually being registered, now under the Help America Vote Act of 2002, “any voter who has not previously voted in a federal election” must provide identification in order to actually cast a ballot. This will make it tough for Mickey Mouse, even if registered, to vote, no matter how big, round, or black his ears. Likewise, members of the Duck family (Donald, Daisy, Huey, Dewey, and Louie) who turn up at the polling place will have a hard time getting into the voting booth. (Uncle Scrooge might be able to bribe his way in, but he’s voting Republican anyway.)

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that despite all the hysteria, from 2002 to 2005, only twenty people in the entire United States of America were found guilty of voting while ineligible and only five of voting more than once.

In short, Republicans are just being assholes jerks, as usual.

But this time, we have a candidate who fights back. This link takes you to a 7 page letter from the Obama campaign to Attorney General Mukasey (hat tip) asking him to review and investigate RNC and the White House putting pressure on US attorneys to make spurious investigations on vote fraud.

A couple of interesting developments:

1. The Chicago Tribune endorsed Obama for President. This was their first Democratic endorsement, ever.

2. “Al Bundy” (from Married With Children) is actually out stumping for Obama.

What to expect?

I fully expect for the polls to close up a bit prior to the election (just as it did in 1992).

Republicans
I’ve said it before and will say it again: the kooks are draining the life out of the Republican party. In short, the Republicans are in a box: they can’t win without the kooks but the kooks are souring independents.

Some Republicans are saying as much

Kathleen Parker:

[...]Radical conservatives are still having an interesting time of it, though these days they are being mutilated by fellow “conservatives.” The well-fed Right now cultivates ignorance as a political strategy and humiliates itself when its brightest sons seek sanctuary in the solitude of personal honor.

The truth few wish to utter is that the GOP has abandoned many conservatives, who mostly nurse their angst in private. Those chickens we keep hearing about have indeed come home to roost. Years of pandering to the extreme wing — the “kooks” the senior Buckley tried to separate from the right — have created a party no longer attentive to its principles.

Instead, as Christopher Buckley pointed out in a blog post on thedailybeast.com explaining his departure from National Review, eight years of “conservatism” have brought us “a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance.”

Republicans are not short on brainpower — or pride — but they have strayed off course. They do not, in fact, deserve to win this time, and someone had to remind them why.

Christopher Buckley, ever the swashbuckling heir to his father’s defiant spirit, walked the plank so that the sinking mother ship might right itself.

No doubt his seafaring father is cheering from heaven: “Ahoy there, Christo! Well done, my son.” [...]

What is the Republican ticket doing now?

Sarah Palin talks about the “pro-America” regions of the country?

First, about those states who are for us…

Palin also made a point of mentioning that she loved to visit the “pro-America” areas of the country, of which North Carolina is one. No word on which states she views as unpatriotic.

Sure, she tried to clarify.

The reporter who broke the story, the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin, sends over the following, extended quote from a more detailed version of the pool report.

“We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe” — here the audience interrupted Palin with applause and cheers — “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation. This is where we find the kindness and the goodness and the courage of everyday Americans. Those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food and are fighting our wars for us. Those who are protecting us in uniform. Those who are protecting the virtues of freedom.”

Ok.

And we have Republican Representatives talking about Obama not being “pro-America” enough? (Michelle Bachman)

And of course, there is more hate from the rank and file:

North Carolinians have two incredible reporters who also run full-time blogs. They are Mark Binker and Laura Leslie. If the editors of this site want to know about North Carolina politics, they need to keep these two on their RSS readers. They are truly impartial, giving it to the Democrats as often as to the Republicans. They allow the online community in North Carolina to peek behind the curtains of power and to understand the ins and outs of Raleigh negotiations. So, when one of them called my attention to this:

“Oh, you think that’s funny?!” the large bearded man said. His face was turning red. “Yeah, that’s real funny…” he said.
And then he kicked the back of leg, buckling my right knee and sending me sprawling onto the ground. [...]

I had to bring it here for the whole world to see. [...]

UPDATE: I totally missed that fellow BlueNC blogger funluvn wrote about this last night. And, funluvn was wise enough to include text from Joe’s own blog post about the event.

From my position there I saw the bottoms of a number of feet almost accidentally stomping me to death as the two political camps screamed back and forth, the music continued to blare and some of the Obama crowd moved the large bearded man and his friends away. When I was helped to my feet the bearded man was walking away quickly.

For a moment I considered running the bloated, twelve-sandwich eating prick down and beating the living hell out of him…and then I remembered that I’m a reporter, how much I enjoy being gainfully employed and how hard it would be to keep my job if I got into a fistfight with a guy at a political rally.

So instead I limped off to try to find a security guard or cop.

When I did the guy was nowhere to be found.

“He’s this big fat guy with a brown beard and he’s wearing a McCain-Palin shirt and hat,” I said.

And then felt like an idiot. I was surrounded by people who fit that description.

So I simply limped to my car fuming.

The McCain camp continues to be a barrel of laughs. They tried so hard to use “Joe the Plumber” as some sort of icon. But of course, it turns out that this guy isn’t an undecided voter, isn’t even a plumber, earns nowhere near 6 digits and isn’t in a position to buy that business anyway. So when this fraud was exposed, the McCain campaign whines about his being exposed!

Delusional Republicans

Haters aren’t attending McCain rallies. Really; that is what John Leo says.

I admitted that the Iowa rally wasn’t like this. But we did have this invocation: (the extra kooky stuff starts about 55 seconds into it)

And some Republicans are counting on some sort of a Bradley effect (anti-liberal Bradley effect) to pull their fat out of the fire.

Some Reviews of Religulous and why I care..

I wrote a review on the film Religulous a few days ago.

Needless to say, there are many other reviews out there, favorable, unfavorable and neutral.

This is a frequent criticism (negative review):

Of course, the faithful he shows us are nothing more than caricatures. The movie spends 10 minutes in a Florida amusement park called The Holy Land Experience, in which the crucifixion is reenacted, with Christian rock music, seven times a day. Maher insults the obese worshippers at a church inside a trailer parked at a truck stop, then finds a former Jew for Jesus–obese, naturally–to insult–inside the man’s ludicrous religious trinket store.

And (neutral review)

Which is what, at its infrequent best, Religulous is: not so much a movie, more a series of interviews with the kookier, clueless representatives of the faithful. Maher chats up one guy who used to be a Satanist priest and a fundamentalist minister whom God cured of being gay. He talks with born-again truckers, and some evangelists who make a plush living off the generous contributions of their cash-strapped communicants. He visits the Creation Museum and an Orlando theme park called the Holy Land Experience, where the actor playing Jesus flunks Maher’s quiz on some of Christianity’s knottier conundrums. On the plus side, he finds two Catholic priests with liberal takes on evolution and Vatican theology, and a couple of members of a very lonely minority: gay Muslim activists. [...]

There’s no question that the kooks give good sound bites, and Void knows there’s been enough evil committed in the names of Jesus and Mohammed. Still, I wanted Maher to confront, and be challenged by, the better class of believers: a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, perhaps, or some articulate Episcopalian or Islamist, or comedian and noted Catholic layman Stephen Colbert. Maher seems interested less in conversation than in confrontation, so his movie is less essay than inquisition. Maybe that tone will win Religulous some conversions, but this critic remains a skeptic.

Uh, this film DID interview more than kooks: Maher interviewed a sitting US Senator (Pryor, D-Arkansas) and a world class scientist (Francis Collins). I don’t think Collins came across as that bad; if they didn’t come across as good it is because they are holding an unsupportable position.

Here are some more positive takes on the film:

One review claims that this film mostly attempts to unite the skeptics:

Skeptics unite: You have nothing to lose but your inhibitions. That, in sum, is the underlying message of Bill Maher and Larry Charles’ brilliant, incendiary Religulous, in which comedian/talk show host Maher inquires of the religious faithful and finds them severely wanting. By providing an example to other nonbelievers, Maher is, um, hell-bent on launching an even more aggressive conversation on the legitimacy of religion than he has on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher. Destined for tons of free media, this documentary looks primed for serious numbers in theatrical and video heaven.

The only recent comparable example of entertainers venturing into such serious cultural-political territory is Penn & Teller’s Showtime series, Bulls—!, which skewers sacred cows from a skeptical-libertarian perspective. Charles’ previous smash, Borat, used funnyman Sacha Baron Cohen to make satirical/political points, but the particular intensity and seriousness of Maher’s project are nearly unprecedented. [...]

In a string of frank, often hilarious but always well-considered conversations with various Christians, Maher incisively asks them what skeptics always ponder about religion in general and Christianity in particular. To John Westcott of Exchange Ministries, which tries to “convert” gay men, Maher asks, given that Jesus never once talked about homosexuality, why is it such an issue for New Testament Christians? To churchgoers in Raleigh, N.C., he notes there’s no firm proof that Jesus Christ ever actually lived. Perhaps most profoundly, he asks Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), a devout evangelical, “Why is faith good?”

To the film’s credit, Maher never engages in Michael Moore-style gotcha tactics, but rather asks questions that raise more questions, in the form of a Socratic dialogue. To believers expecting a blind hatchet job, this will prove both thought-provoking and a bit disarming; skeptics may be surprised (as Maher is) by the occasionally smart replies to his queries.

And this one which claims that Maher doesn’t just exploit the more ignorant for laughs:

You probably know my bias going into this film. I believe that religion is not just irrational but anti-rational, a Bronze Age worldview that should have been left behind when we started figuring out science. Bill Maher sees it the same way, and he makes no bones about it. But this isn’t a review of Maher’s ideas (10/10 on that one) but of the movie itself. How does Religulous stack up as a film?

It stacks up really well. The basic concept of the film has Maher traveling around the world talking to believers about what they believe, and most importantly why (or how they can believe it, for that matter). From the Holy Land to the Holy Land Experience theme park in Florida, Maher goes where the believers are and engages them on their home turf. That makes a huge difference in how the film feels, as does the fact that he actually confronts them. Religulous is directed by comic genius and Borat helmer Larry Charles, and it would have been easy to do this movie in a similar vein to that one – letting these people dig themselves a ridiculous hole with their own words – but Maher isn’t interested in that. He wants to interact with these people, to confront them with the logic-hating aspects of their faiths and see what they come back with.

That’s where I think the movie succeeds the most, but also one of the main places where detractors will come after it. They’ll say that Maher is looking just to clown these people, but that isn’t the case. He’s more than slightly exasperated with the cop out answers that people give him (to the point where he actually gets kind of excited when a Jesus impersonater explains the parodoxical Holy Trinity by comparing it to the three states of water. It’s bullshit, Maher says, but it’s interesting and new bullshit to him), and this film is supposed to be funny so he’s being funny, but he’s also being fair. He’s asking these people straight, direct questions. In return he’s getting garbage like ‘What if you die and find out you’re wrong?’

And he’s not going after random people in churches. He’s going to self-styled leaders and full-time religious people as much as possible (although some of the film’s best moments do come from tourists in the gift shop at The Holy Land Experience as they debate the place of Jews in the Kingdom of Heaven), the kind of people who are supposed to have the answers to give. The kind of people who are supposed to have given some thought to their faith. And yet again and again these are the people with the flimsiest crap, who present proof of the Almighty with miracles like God making it rain on cue during a party. Maher handily makes short work of most of these people, with a few interesting exceptions. The Catholics he speaks with come off fairly well as modern people who understand that the Bible is filled with allegories for how we should live our lives, not straight history and science lessons.

Of course, some of the subjects were duped into being interviewed.

So, why the focus on religion?

Well, religion is affecting our lives at the moment. Hopefully, some well timed ridicule will eventually make outbursts like this one unacceptable:

We’ve noted several times in recent weeks that some of Sarah Palin’s more ardent right-wing supporters are firmly convinced that she has indeed been chosen and anointed by God and are comparing her to Queen Esther, declaring her “destined to be the matriarch of her people.”

It looks like all of this talk of her diving predestination is even starting to convince Palin herself that God wants her in the White House: [...]

Giving credit to a higher power for the day’s poll ratings, the Alaska governor told the roughly 500-person audience that things might be changing. “We even saw today, thank the Lord,” she said, looking upwards and raising her fist, “We saw some movement.”

Hopefully things like this (the part where an undecided voter’s wife talks about why Obama is unacceptable to her: Obama’s religion, having an atheist mother and Muslim father, and his NAME) will be so widely and openly ridiculed that people will not talk this way in public. Click on the video.