What is the point of this poll?

Some polls you know are just set up to try and get affirmations of what the pollster believes. Others are more inscrutable. Why would CNN even bother to ask this?

Do you believe the Apollo moon landings were faked?

Yes 14%
No 86%

It’s meta-meaninglessness. I was tempted to vote yes, not because I think the moon landings were faked (shee-ya, you’d have to be a raving moron to think that), but because the poll question was so freakishly crazy.

But then, I guess that’s what the modern media does. It doesn’t evaluate; its job is just to treat every point of view as if they were equally sensible.

What is in the water on C Street?

Some epidemiologist ought to investigate this. There is a building on C Street in Washington DC which houses the offices of a fervent evangelical Christian contingent of conservative politicians, who are all, of course, paragons of probity. Except…something funny has been going on. Three of them have been publicly humiliated for their inability to keep their pecker in their pants.

Leisha Pickering said in the lawsuit filed this week that her husband and the woman dated in college, reconnected and began having an affair while he was in Congress and living in a building where several Christian lawmakers reside on C Street near the U.S. Capitol. Chip Pickering is the third Republican with ties to the building at 133 C Street SE to find his personal life making headlines in recent weeks, after Nevada U.S. Sen. John Ensign and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

He cast himself as a defender of decency, particularly on television and the Internet, and was among House members urging then-President George W. Bush to declare 2008 “the National Year of the Bible.”

Another lawmaker who lived at the C Street house, Ensign, a member of the Christian ministry Promise Keepers, stepped down from the Senate Republican leadership in June after admitting he had an affair for much of last year with a woman on his campaign staff.

Just days after the story broke, South Carolina Republican Gov. Mark Sanford admitted an affair with a woman in Argentina. He apparently never lived in the house, but has said he turned to “C Street” for counsel and solace while having the affair.

They’re Christians, so it is simply inconceivable that they could have lapsed so far from the strict morality of their faith unless something underhanded is going on: some liberal probably spiked their water supply with Viagra, or sprayed aphrodisiacs into the air ducts.

Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles

One nice thing about being the most evil blogger on the interwebs is that I can occasionally trick my kids into thinking I might be just a little bit cool. My son Connlann introduced me to the black humor of Mr Wiggles (my kids have inherited a weird sense of humor!), and the author, Neil Swaab, offered me a copy of his latest compilation, Rehabilitating Mr Wiggles. I mentioned that it was my boy who led me to Mr Wiggles, and so Neil generously sent me a second copy, autographed for Connlann. See the effect?

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If you don’t know Mr Wiggles, you’re probably going to spend the next few hours browsing in appalled fascination.

BioLogos sans Collins

Francis Collins will be stepping down from his role at the BioLogos Foundation, as part of the process of becoming the head of the NIH.

This is only a minimal step, however, and it really doesn’t address any of my objections to the guy. The foundation and its web site will still be going on, and you know that once he finishes his tenure at NIH, he’ll just step back into it. I’m more concerned about whether he’ll be injecting religion into his politics on the job.

Ben Stein sinking ever lower

Several people have notified me that this ugly mug is appearing in the ads on this site:

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Yep, Ben Stein is hawking “free” credit reports on my site. Only…they aren’t free. They aren’t useful. And Ben Stein is being an exploitive douchebag.

A few points are worth noting here. First, the score itself is not very useful to consumers. What’s useful is the report — if there’s an error on the report, then the consumer can try to rectify it. Secondly, and much more importantly, if you want a free credit report, there’s only one place to go: annualcreditreport.com. That’s the place where the big three credit-rating agencies will give you a genuinely free copy of your credit report once a year, as required by federal law.

You won’t be surprised to hear that freescore.com is not free: in order to get any information out of them at all, you have to authorize them to charge you a $29.95 monthly fee. They even extract a dollar out of you up front, just to make sure that money is there.

Stein, here, has become a predatory bait-and-switch merchant, dangling a “free” credit report in front of people so that he can sock them with a massive monthly fee for, essentially, doing nothing at all. Naturally, the people who take him up on this offer will be those who can least afford it.

The level to which Stein has now sunk is more than enough reason — as if the case for the prosecution weren’t damning enough already — for the NYT to cancel Stein’s contract forthwith. It’s simply unconscionable for a newspaper of record to employ as its “Everybody’s Business” columnist someone who is surely making a vast amount of money by luring the unsuspecting into overpaying for a financial product they should under no circumstances buy.

Who in their right mind would accept economic advice from Ben Stein, anyway?