Edward Cline,
Mexicans are not the cultural brethren of Muslims. Mexican culture has first world potential. Mexico in time could join the first world. Islamic culture and Islamic nations will not join the first world. (By "first world," I mean nations that are well-established, genuine liberal democracies, with real freedom of speech, freedom of religion, governments that are not hopelessly corrupt, economies that are reasonably independent of government, and a strong and large middle class. Islamic nations will never have real liberal democracy.)

I'm glad about the article's focus on demographic decline in the Islamic world. But it doesn't touch the biggest question. We have been hearing for some years now that Europe would be Muslim-majority by the end of the century. But some are now claiming that this is not at all the case. A book called The Myth of the Muslim Tide claims that, due to rapid declines in reproductive rates among Muslims, the peak percentage of Muslims in Europe will be 10% or less, and that peak will happen around 2050. In the U.S. the peak, according to the book just mentioned, will be 2%.

Now, it's a huge question that needs answering. Is Europe going to be Muslim-majority by the end of the century? Or is it going to peak at 10%. Because if it's going to peak at 10% of less, then European freedom will be challenged, but it will not die.

So we need to know.

Whateverman says: "What you call combat operations, the world calls war crimes..."

Liar. You appoint yourself and your opinions as "the world's" opinions? Immodest little tyrant. God forbid you should ever be in a position of responsibility. If you could get away with it you'd probably lord it over your subordinates like Saddam Hussein lorded it over his.

scott and Mary Sue, you are both partly right, I think.

I consider myself half-Jewish, because I carry some Jewish traditions and cultural characteristics from my father. From my mother I carry some Christian traditions. Both of those traditions and cultures are part of who I am. So while from one or another point of view, it might be considered misconceived, nevertheless I consider myself half-Jewish, half Christian. Sometimes I consider myself all Jewish and all Christian simultaneously. I'm sort of a Jew for Jesus and a Christian for the Jews. My religion I suppose is Christianity. But I love Jewish people and feel proud I have some share in them, and I'm not about to give it up.

When I was a child, my parents celebrated both Christmas and Channakuh (more Christmas). We celebrated Passover once in a while. (As a child, I used to think that Thanksgiving was a Jewish holiday, because my Jewish grandparents always made Thanksgiving dinner. My grandmother was a great cook who always wanted me to eat more.)

Yes, sometimes Maher almost sounds like a hard-line Islam-critic, though he's not quite there.

I suspect the ascendancy of the progressives these days is part of a fairly long term pendulum swing. We had the Reagan conservative pendulum swing from 1980 through the election of GWB. I include Clinton in the conservative Reagan revolution, even though Clinton resisted in some ways -- Clinton was forced to yield in many ways to the rising conservative views of the economy and welfare and a host of issues. The conservative pendulum swing thus lasted at least twenty years, if we say it was really petering out around the time of GWB's first election and first term. So the progressive pendulum swing, if that's what it is, might last about twenty years as well, though of course this is not physics, and things might not happen that way at all.

I see two extremes in coverage of Obama. The one extreme worships him as incredibly brilliant in every little thing he does, which is nauseating, not only because it's disgusting to worship any political figure, but also because the person who worships Obama that way is often someone who secretly is a racist, who fears that blacks might be intellectually inferior, and is trying to bend over backwards to hide the fact that he suspects that to be true -- perhaps to hide that suspicion even from himself. So he leaps to call Obama the most brilliant thing since Einstein. That's one extreme of coverage of Obama.

The other extreme says the kind of thing you said, "mOderateGuy." You said -- he's "not smart enough to manipulate a dinner fork."

Both extremes are surely wrong. Obama is probably as bright as many people who have become president -- which is to say, not brilliant, but brighter in several respects than the average person. I'd guess that Obama's I.Q. is at between 120 and 135, not bad at all, but not a genius.

enlightened25,

Equality before the law is neither a myth nor a reality, but something in between -- an ideal that many have tried to realize, with some success and some failure. It is far superior to having some jerk like Hitler and his party above the law and ruling in a completely arbitrary and idiotic fashion. Law is also far superior to every other form of dictatorial, non-law-based situation, where some group, person, religion or ideology is above law, not because the group in question is better than others or more enlightened than others, but because they are in fact worse than others, fanatical morons prepared to do anything to others in order to realize the most idiotic and destructive goals, including absolute power. Your belief that domination is everything actually makes you a scary individual. You say you are honest, but if so, your mindset is warped and you need to more broadly educate yourself in every direction possible.

enlightened25,

The world is full of people like you, who have insane enthusiasm for some little idea to which they have grabbed on.

A Nietszche worshipper. Will to power is everything. Have you really progressed no further than that? Are you 17 years old? Guess what. Tomorrow or next month you'll worship some other philosophy. But perhaps one day you might no longer have to worship any narrow idea set at all. You'll join the world beyond "isms," the world of living ideas. What someone like you needs is to get deeply into Shakespeare's language and poetic, metaphoric way of thinking, perhaps through Kenneth Branagh's Henry 5 film, to start. Maybe Shakespeare's plays, with their poetic language and metaphoric mode of speech and thought would teach you that the process and life of thinking is more important than finding an ultimate stopping point, an answer, an ultimate paradigm, and would pull you out of the intellectual pit into which you have fallen. Though the problem is deeper than intellectual. You have no memory of real love, and think everything is about domination. I suppose nothing I can say would ever convince you that you are mistaken. But you are. Of that I am as certain as I can be. If you think you've already examined the evidence, examine it again, and again, and again, until you either give or receive real love. It does exist, and your bull**** about the will to power being everything and everything being about who dominates, is a false (and self-impoverishing) oversimplification of a much more complex world. Good luck. You'll definitely need it, with the deadly and very limited collection of lenses by which you currently see things.

As Churchill put it, democracy is the worst form of government...except for all the others.