Am I the only one who's shaking his head at the idea that a school had the money to hire a private detective to investigate this woman and her family? Is this how they spend the money they're always insisting they need for "the children"?

I thought of that same thing, the momentary outcry that Scarlett O'Hara was going to be played by some English woman.

Anyway, last time I checked, Superman wasn't an American either.

When I was growing up and encountered the divide between creationism and evolution, my mother gave me a simple and logical answer: She said we have no idea what God may have considered to be a "year". Made sense to me then, makes sense to me now. Humans always try to put God in some context that we can understand, like thinking our units of time mean anything to an eternal being, or heaven being gold streets and mansions, God being an old man with a beard, etc. In truth, there is nothing in the human experience that can describe God or understand how God works.

This may be the dumbest thing I've ever heard anyone say, starting with his reference to the "imaginary person" who breaks into your house (he didn't do the fingers thing but you could sure hear the air quotes) as if break ins never happen; then compounding it by saying gun toting racists single out the poor as being likely to rob them. Well, duh, Mikey. I don't think the rich folks on the the other side of town are likely to climb through your window at 3 am to take your TV. If somebody's trying to get in my house I don't stop to say I'll bet it's a poor African American Person of Color, I just grab the Winchester and get ready to blow them into the arms of Jesus.

If you check the history of using "gay" to mean something negative, as in "that shirt is gay, dude", I'm sure you'll find it's fairly recent. I know I never heard it used that way until the late 80s. Prior to that, it either meant homosexual or its older meaning, cheerful and happy. It seems to me that the same people who started using it as a mild insult 25 years ago are now calling it a slur and acting as if they didn't popularize the use of the word in that manner to start with.

I wonder if he and Harry Reid will get in a slap fight over saving the country from Depression: Obama claims credit for it and so does Reid. Meantime, unemployment in Reid's Nevada is 15%.

Every time Obama uses his "car in a ditch" story, I want to add that he thinks you can get a car out of a ditch by digging deeper.

What irks the hell out of me is that using "gay" this way seems to have become popular in the 80s or 90s. As a college student and then a resident of the trendiest neighborhoods in both Washington, DC and Chicago in the 70s, I never heard gay used as a synonym for dumb, undesirable, or stupid. I think if it had been in use, at some point I would have heard it. I did hear old school folks wailing that the "perfectly good word" gay had been perverted into meaning homosexual, however. They had no similar laments for the perversion of faggot, queer, pansy, fruit, or fairy.

My point is that it's as if the same people who, as kids, popularized using gay to mean stupid are now falling all over themselves to be outraged when its used that way.

I went to a similar exhibit in Raleigh, NC. We were each handed a "ticket" made out in the name of a passenger as we entered. I did the double take of my life when I saw the name on mine, and here's why: when I was in the sixth grade, we wrote and performed a little play about the sinking of the Titanic, and I played a passenger whose name we randomly pulled from the book A Night to Remember. In that play, I was a doomed first class passenger named Arthur Ryerson. Imagine the Twilight Zone feeling I got when I looked at the name on the ticket I was handed at the exhibit--Arthur Ryerson.

Feeling almost haunted by this man, I researched him and found that the Ryerson family was on the Titanic because they'd cut short their trip to Europe to return home because of the death of their college student son in a car accident. In that tragic April of 1912, Mrs Ryerson lost her oldest child and her husband.

I just saw Easy A yesterday, and found that Nolte has missed the boat: Let's start by saying that you can be both conservative and Christian and still despise those churchy, judgmental types who chirp at you about Jesus loving you even though you're going to hell. I get very uneasy about websites that promote a blind allegiance to anything that has a veneer of Christian religion or patriotism on it. There are hypocritical Christians and "patriotic" scoundrels all around us and the intelligent conservative should always be free to skewer them. In Easy A, Olive runs into a small school club of Christian poseurs who do consider her to be the enemy, but her real enemy--as the movie makes clear--is her classmates eagerness to spread and believe the silliest kinds of gossip. Olive never ridicules the teachings of Christ, she even seeks out the counsel of clergymen in an effort to sort out the right or wrong of the charade she's perpetuating.

Smaller quibbles with Nolte is that I never got that the gay kid was her best friend, in fact it seemed like she'd hadn't hung out with him in a long time. Far from being wonderful in every way, when she asks him for help in restoring her reputation, he categorically refuses because her confirmation that he had heterosex has kept him from being teased and tormented every day. He winds up with a hot boyfriend and couldn't care less what happens to her. Another ongoing theme in the movie is that everyone she helped out by lying for them is prospering while she is scorned and condemned--just as the Reverend Dimmesdale was able to maintain his position because Hester Prynne didn't expose him. The references to John Hughes are a homage and I found them to be pretty darn cool and endearing. She wishes she could live in a John Hughes movie. I think a lot of us do. And the Demi Moore movie gets ridiculed throughout this one, as do all the "free spirit" California parents who try to be friends with their kids and share way too much.

Before I get too swept up in admiring how great the Duggars are for home-schooling, being religious, and not letting the kids hear Lady Gaga, I'd consider a few things: It's probably easier to afford to have so many babies when your family has a network TV show that pays the freight--and rather like we used to complain about welfare, gives them a raise/renewed contract with each new baby. Similarly, not asking for handouts is easier when the Discovery Network furnishes your house, provides the appliances, and buys the food.

The Duggar parents elected to skip birth control and have the Lord decide how many kids they should have. There are a lot of baby daddies and baby mommas in urban America who apparently share that same theory but don't get TV shows from it. The Duggars avoid having their own kids become baby daddies and mommas by practicing some very strict courting rituals that keep the romantic couple chaste and chaperoned, just in case the Lord might get some ideas about encouraging them to start the baby making before they're married.

In other words, I think this family is neither to be overly admired nor overly criticized. Their situation may work for them admirably, but it's not a normal one, and after several years of starring in their own TV show, they have become accomplished actors who sell the idealistic picture of a better life in a large brood because their show depends on it.