The editors of the Wall Street Journal: "Ben Carson for President."

Another egregious example of GOP types who gush with embarrassing enthusiasm in the presence of a black person who says some conservative things.

I have 2 problems with Ben Carson:

1. He had the opportunity to speak at a prayer breakfast with President Obama alongside him on the dais, and he used it to deliver a political lecture. I don't think that's right. Whatever your opinion of Obama's politics or the process by which he became President — which included plenty of embarrassing enthusiasm in the presence of a black person— he is the President, and — especially at a formal occasion like this — he deserves the respect embodied in the office of the President.

2. Ben Carson read a speech. It was a good speech — though, as noted above, it was not appropriate for the occasion — but it was a written speech. Carson is a pediatric neurosurgeon, not an economist or a  health care policy wonk or a speechwriter. We don't know what contribution he made to the writing of the speech. I don't know how that speech got into his hands, but once he had that position on the dais at the prayer breakfast, those hands were very valuable hands in which to put a speech. Who is the speechwriter? If it was Carson himself, alone, I'd be extremely impressed. And extremely surprised.

"Muslim professor Mustafa Umar explained... that there is 'nothing intrinsically wrong with wearing nail polish'..."

"... the real issue is that this substance forms an impermeable barrier over the nails preventing water from getting underneath."

For years, women have been required to either remove and reapply polish for prayers every day, or wait to wear it during the week they have their period - when they're not allowed to pray.

Solution: "Breathable" nail polish.

Video from the "Guns Across America" rally here in Madison, Wisconsin today.

Here's some edited video showing the crowd and the signs.



In the middle there is a prayer, and at the end is the national anthem. Once you get to the national anthem, it's all national anthem from there on. I decided not to edit that part down because you get a good view of the people who attended the rally and their attitude.

The prayer is quite interesting, including some discussion of what Jesus said to Peter after he cut off a man's ear. (Jesus didn't tell Peter to surrender his sword. He told him to "put it back in the holster." My Bible says "sheath," but Jesus wasn't speaking English.)

At 2:07, you see a sign that says "Political Power Grows Out of the Barrel of a Gun. Mao," held next to a second, matching sign that says — in between 2 peace signs — "Support and Defend the Constitution."

At 2:15, I'm talking to this man about his nice-looking but hard-to-stop-and-read sign:



He asks me if I recognize the face and (despite knowing I'm wrong) I guess Michael J. Fox. He lets me know it's Ayn Rand and I say I'll read it later (knowing I've got the still). It says: "The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology."

At 2:35, I talk to a counter-protester with a sign that says "Ban High Capacity Magazine Clips" and ask "What's a magazine clip?" She knew there was some question about that term, but she'd researched it on the internet and decided that was the term she wanted to use. Perhaps saying "magazine clip" is a way to signal which side you're on. A shibboleth.

ADDED: Other stills from the rally here.

Was Giglio chosen for the inauguration benediction in order to provide cover for Chuck Hagel?

"An evangelical pastor from Atlanta [Rev. Louie Giglio] announced Thursday that he would not give the benediction at President Obama’s swearing-in ceremony after a sermon he gave on homosexuality in the mid-1990s resurfaced earlier this week."

Suspicion: Giglio was chosen with full knowledge of that sermon and the intention that it would "resurface" and that he would then conspicuously withdraw. This would promote Obama's pro-gay stance and take the heat off Chuck Hagel, who's got an anti-gay remark in his record which the Obama people would like to submerge. It was all planned: the desire for Hagel to become Secretary of Defense, the known problem of his anti-gay remark, the desire to perform a conspicuous expiation, the identification of Giglio as a plausible benediction-giver with an anti-gay remark in his history, choosing Giglio, revealing the old Giglio sermon, Giglio bowing out in a tribute to Obama's rejection of homophobia, Hagel saved by the scapegoat.

I'm not saying I believe this is what happened, and I certainly have no inside knowledge. I'm just noticing the correlations and putting together a hypothesis. Please discuss.

You can pull me back from this suspicion if you make a great case for why else Giglio would have been chosen for this honor. He's a white male, by the way.

Yoga in public schools — an Establishment Clause problem.

NPR has trouble seeing the objection. This kids are stretching, readying their minds for learning, don't you know? But here's one mother's report:

"They were being taught to thank the sun for their lives and the warmth that it brought, the life that it brought to the earth and they were told to do that right before they did their sun salutation exercise"...

The woman, Mary Eady, was able to take her son out of the classes — which is an appropriate accommodation but insufficient to solve an Establishment Clause violation. (In the old prayer-in-school cases, excusing the students who chose not to pray did not suffice.)

The school's program was richly funded by the K.P. Jois Foundation, whose Hindu founders connected yoga to their religion.

"It's stated in the curriculum that it's meant to shape the way that they view the world, it's meant to shape the way that they make life decisions," Eady says. "It's meant to shape the way that they regulate their emotions and the way that they view themselves."

"And then the question becomes — if it is religious, which it is, who decides when enough religion has been stripped out of the program to make it legal?" [says Dean Broyles, president and chief counsel of the Escondido-based National Center for Law and Policy]. "I mean, that's the problem when you introduce religion into the curriculum and actually immerse and marinate children in the program."...

"It is the stated goal of both the Jois Foundation and the district itself to prove scientifically that Ashtanga yoga works for kids here in the district and then export it nationally," Broyles says.

The Jois Foundation has a director, Eugene Ruffin, who is himself Catholic and who says the values taught in the program aren't specifically Hindu. But making religion generic doesn't solve your problem. Consult the original Warren Court school-prayer case, Engel v. Vitale, which involved a prayer concocted by the state that stripped out all denominational specificity.

My position — explained here in the context of Kwanzaa — is that the government should not use schools for exercises that reach into the spiritual aspect of the child's mind. Quite aside from whether courts would see an Establishment Clause violation, it should be rejected as a policy choice. Even where you have trouble deciding whether something is religion or not, if it's a religion substitute, operating like religion, you should be revolted by the government intruding into the sphere that belongs to the individual, parents, and private organizations. And on this ground, I would object to all sorts of indoctrination and idol-worship. Public schools must be committed to teaching real substance of the secular kind. Think: math and science.

ADDED: Imagine if a Christian foundation were handing out huge grants to public schools to adopt a program based on its values, with generic prayer-like incantations led by the teacher. Would NPR and its devotees be nodding calmly at how nice it was?

ALSO: NPR quotes the mother's attempt at paraphrasing the prayer-like incantation. I'd like to see the actual text that the school uses! Here's some material at the Jois website, but it doesn't show the text I'm looking for.

"My mother is a baptized Christian, so she made me go to church every Sunday, and I prayed four times a day until I was 14."

"And at lunchtime kids at school would giggle at my praying...I stopped praying. And two weeks later, nothing happened to me, so I didn't pick it up again."

Ang Lee, in an interview about his movie "Life of Pi," which is based on a novel with a strong religious theme. He does, he says (like so many others) like to think of himself as spiritual.

"Help, Thanks, Wow."

Prayer, distilled by Anne Lamott.

"Rosary rallies" at the Wisconsin Capital are partisan politics....

... according to some partisans of the side that is not the one the reciters of Catholic prayers are supposedly partisan for.

Local organizers are continuing the rallies every Thursday through Nov. 1 to focus people's prayers on issues such as religious liberty and opposition to abortion and contraception, said the Rev. Rick Heilman, pastor of St. Ignatius Catholic Church in Mount Horeb.

Heilman said Nov. 1 was chosen as the last rally because the weather will be turning colder and because it is All Saint's Day, during which Catholics honor all saints....

At the Aug. 16 rally, Heilman told the crowd that "amazing things are happening right here in this very place," including the failure of "this whole nonsense of recalling this strong governor" (referring to Republican Scott Walker) and "now tapping our own Paul Ryan" as a vice presidential candidate....

Craig Spaulding, 47, of Madison, one of about a dozen counter-protesters who have been attending the rallies, doesn't buy it. "It's definitely partisan," he said. "It's all about the GOP."

The Freedom From Religion Foundation, based in Madison, has been watching the rallies with concern. Tax-exempt groups such as churches are not to say or do anything that indicates whom they want people to vote for or against, said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president. 

"Both as Wayne and as super-Wayne he seems indifferent, as the films themselves are, to the activities of little people..."

"... and to the claims of the everyday, preferring to semi-purse his lips, as if preparing to whistle for an errant dog, and stare pensively into the distance. Caped or uncaped, the guy is a bore. He should have kids; that would pull him out of himself. Or else he should hang out with Iron Man and get wasted. He should have fun."

"Batman's Bane," by Anthony Lane. (No Aurora massacre content.)

That link is worth clicking on just to get to the cartoon — a guy in a bar looking into his highball glass says: "I don't know anything about global warming, but these ice cubes are melting like crazy."

By the way, I read a plot summary of "The Dark Knight Rises," because I'm not going to see it — I rarely go to the movies anymore and I experienced the last Batman movie an unpleasant chore (not out of fear of massacre) — and because I wanted to understand the connection to "Occupy Wall Street" politics. Anthony Lane pooh-poohs the connection:

True, we see a handful of rich white men being ejected from fancy apartments, but then the film coughs politely and moves on, as if recalling that nobody is richer or whiter than Bruce Wayne, and that his apartment is, in fact, a castle. Also, the outcome is positively Victorian, in that its dread of disorder far outweighs its relish of liberty uncaged; the throng is faced down and tamed by ranks of growling police officers.

Lane fails to contemplate the possibility that the movie is against the Occupy side. Here's Rush Limbaugh working that theme — Batman is Romney! Batman/Romney is "the rich guy, milquetoast, boring, dull," but if he "puts the uniform back on," he "saves the day."

In fact, the producer -- or the creator, Chuck Dixon -- says that the villain in this movie is almost... I forget his exact words, but he links the villain in this movie to Occupy Wall Street. And yet the Democrats are out there trying to say Bane is Bain. I think this exposes the frailty of their position.

So, as I said, I read the plot summary. It looks incredibly dull and over-complicated when distilled into forthright sentences, but it was all quite meaningless to me. If the film says anything about politics, I'm not going to be the one to figure out what.

***

That's not meant to say anything about the murders, which I don't think should be inflated with political imagination. Let's resist the temptation to say things that might entice delusional people to make the decision to act out. You could suddenly one day be the most famous person on earth, whose face everyone will gaze upon, whose mind everyone will contemplate. You could make the presidential candidates suspend their campaigns and command everyone to pray and pray over the dramatic changes you have made in their puny little world. Let's resist the temptation to create that temptation.

"It sends the wrong message to distraught farmers when the Agriculture Secretary suggests that the best response is to pray."

"For a Cabinet official to recommend prayer as a solution or call attention to his own devotions may violate the Constitution’s prohibition against establishment of religion. Most important, though, is that prayer doesn’t work. But if you want to test the power of prayer yourself, consider this. Apparently Secretary Vilsack’s been praying for rain every day; how’s that working out?"

Says the Council for Secular Humanism. They're wrong about the Establishment Clause, and I think the phrase "may violate" indicates that they know it. But they do have a point about government officials talking about prayer... or is that nothing more than the same point you could make about anybody praying? All that praying for things that don't happen generates evidence that prayer doesn't work.

I know the religion-based answers to that last point. (God answers prayers in ways other than granting the thing prayed-for, etc.) But I think it's different when a government official bandies religion about. A short, respectful reference to God or to prayer is standard rhetoric that isn't out of place in politician-speak. Did Vilsack go too far with "I get on my knees every day. And I’m saying an extra prayer now. If I had a rain prayer or a rain dance I could do, I would do it”?

It's not like he's trying to excuse himself for failing to do something he could do. I know government officials frequently act as though they could control the great forces of nature/human behavior/the economy, so I'd rather see the open acknowledgment that there's nothing to be done, which is basically what Vilsack is saying.

Now, if that means praying is nothing, maybe religionists should be offended. Also, "rain dance" might be offensive to Native Americans. Come on, everyone, let's get offended.

"Mitt and Ann Romney’s marriage is strong because they believe they will live together in an eternal afterlife..."

Writes Jodi Kantor in the NYT, citing "relatives and friends" as the source of information. It's a whole long article about Mitt Romney's Mormon faith.

Fascinating! But what I'd like to know is what Barack and Michelle Obama are picturing for the afterlife. NYT, can you clue me in? Because I feel like there are so many things we never found out about Obama the first time around in 2008. How about now?

But, of course, Jodi Kantor published a whole book about the Obamas. It's called "The Obamas." I bought it. On Kindle! So let me do a little search for an answer to my question. How are the Obama's planning to spend their eternal life? Do they believe there's a heaven, and do husbands and wives stay together there?

Word searches in "The Obamas" that returned 0 results: afterlife, afterworld, immortality, immortal, beyond the grave....

Other fruitless searches: eternal (2 matches, both to Obama's calling himself "the eternal optimist"), eternity (some short period of time is referred to as "an eternity in presidential time"), heaven (at the inauguration, Beyoncé Knowles sang "At Last" to the Obamas — "Life is like a song... Here we are in heaven").

In fact, there are only 2 occurrences of "religion" in the text of "The Obamas."
The first is not a reference to Obama's religion, just Obama saying that "Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country" (rejecting opposition to building a mosque near the World Trade Center site). The second is a reference to a poll that showed 18% of adults and 31% of Republicans thought Obama was a Muslim:

Only a third said he was a Christian, down substantially from the prior year, and another 43 percent said they did not know his religion at all. It was astonishing— some of the same people who had criticized him as being in the thrall of Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., his former pastor, now believed him to be a devout follower of the prophet Muhammad.

Wait! They didn't say they thought he was devout. They might simply have thought that he was Muslim by inheritance through his father, a cultural matter, which would be quite true. Why make fun of the people who are stuck within the constraints of a poll question? And why act as if that idea — Obama is a Muslim by cultural inheritance through the father — is inconsistent with the criticism of his attachment to Jeremiah Wright? Those criticisms had to do with anti-Americanism and left-wing ideology, not Christian doctrine. (I think I know why. Don't you?)

Some Democrats cried malpractice at the White House for not countering the Muslim rumors with professions of Christian faith: Could aides please just stick a Bible in the president’s hand once in a while? Get him to join a church already? Early in the presidential campaign, Obama had heavily marketed his own religiosity; he won his critical primary victory in South Carolina in part by speaking in churches and distributing literature showing his head bowed in prayer. But ever since the Wright scandal, the Obamas had tried to argue that their faith was a private matter, off-limits for public discussion. Inside the White House during the summer of 2010, as outsiders quietly begged for the president to showcase his Christianity again, there was virtually no serious discussion of the matter, said David Axelrod and others. Telling the president that his staff had been strategizing about his religiosity “wouldn’t be taken well,” Axelrod explained. Since the Obamas had arrived in the White House, they had attended church intermittently, they would continue to do so, and that was that. There was no creative brainstorming about ways to underscore the president’s Christianity for the public, another aide said, because all discussions had to take place within the category of things Barack Obama might actually be willing to do.

And now the Romney campaign is doing the same thing, as Kantor's article says in the third paragraph:

... Mr. Romney speaks so sparingly about his faith — he and his aides frequently stipulate that he does not impose his beliefs on others — that its influence on him can be difficult to detect.

But....

Outside the spotlight, Mr. Romney can be demonstrative about his faith: belting out hymns (“What a Friend We Have in Jesus”) while horseback riding, fasting on designated days and finding a Mormon congregation to slip into on Sundays, no matter where he is. 

And...

Just as Ronald Reagan deployed acting skills on the trail and Barack Obama relied on the language of community organizing, Mitt Romney bears the marks of the theology and culture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints....

Mormons have a long tradition of achieving success by sharing secular versions of their tenets, said Matthew Bowman, author of “The Mormon People,” citing Stephen R. Covey’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” which he called Latter-day Saint theology repackaged as career advice. ...

Mr. Romney is quick to uphold rules great and small. During primary debates, when his rivals spoke out of turn or exceeded their allotted time, he would sometimes lecture them. When supporters ask Mr. Romney to sign dollar bills or American flags, he refuses and often gives them a little lesson about why doing so is against the law. 

Doing things by the book has been a hallmark of his career in public life. When Mr. Romney took over the Salt Lake City Olympics, which were dogged by ethical problems, he cast himself as a heroic reformer. As governor of Massachusetts, he depicted himself as a voice of integrity amid what he called the back-scratchers and ethically dubious lifers of state government....

Isn't this pretty much exactly the role we want religion to have in government? It's a strong foundation for commitment to principle and ethics. I'm not saying it's the only foundation, or that religions always support the best principles and ethics, but religion is the moral foundation for most people. It's still up to the individual to make sure that he is using religion for the good, especially if he goes into politics. There's no evidence that Romney has misused his religious values (or that the stranger aspects of Mormonism have anything to do with the way he would govern).

George Clooney's big party for Obama in a tent — not in his house — on his basketball court.

WaPo reports:

“We raised a lot of money because everybody loves George. They like me, they love him. And rightfully so. Not only is he an unbelievable actor, but he is one of those rare individuals who is at ease with everybody. He seems to occupy a constant state of grace, and uses his extraordinary talents on behalf of something truly important.”

Clooney listened intently to the president throughout, his hands folded as if in prayer and his chin resting on them.

His famous chin. Surely, prayers prayed with hands rested upon that chin are answered.

"White House Works to Shape Debate Over Health Law"... with a prayer vigil.

The quote in the post title is the headline of this NYT article by Robert Pear, which begins by telling us that the White House is undertaking "an aggressive campaign" to milk maximum political advantage out of the upcoming 3 days of Supreme Court oral argument over the Affordable Care Act.

On Wednesday, White House officials summoned dozens of leaders of nonprofit organizations that strongly back the health law to help them coordinate plans for a prayer vigil, press conferences and other events outside the court when justices hear arguments for three days beginning March 26.

Coordinate plans for a prayer vigil?!

That's one way to shape debate, showing people praying to keep Obamacare alive. But why would the White House want to create the impression that they believe that God, influenced by prayer, might sway the Supreme Court? Or is it that they believe that some Supreme Court Justices might be swayed by the spectacle of people praying for a statute to be held constitutional? They can't want us to believe they believe that. Presumably, they just want to promote the belief that Obamacare is terribly important and people desperately want it preserved. Personally, I think Obama is better off politically if the Supreme Court strikes down the law, so for maximum political advantage what he ought to want is simply to impress the electorate with the desperate need for Obamacare, so if its taken away we'll feel outraged instead of relieved.

"To those Christians who have venomously and vomitously cursed the Court family..."

"... and threatened bodily harm and assassination: In His name, I forgive you.... To those in the executive and legislative branches of government who have demagogued this case for their own political goals: You should be ashamed of yourselves...."

U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, writing an order approving a settlement in a school prayer case.

Meade's mud.

Meade declares that he has arrived at a great new method of making coffee. This isn't how he made it for me, but something he did for himself this morning.



"That's what they call 'mud,'" I say, getting my camera out. As I'm blogging the photographs, he wants to put the instructions his way: "Step 1: Buy the best coffee beans you can afford. Step 2: Grind as fine as possible. Step 3: Put ground coffee in a mug, pour hot water over it, stir. Step 4: Allow 1 minute for grounds to settle — for mud to settle — to the bottom. Step 5: Profit! Enjoy! Salut!"



I'm all excited because mud is a theme here on the blog lately. Writing yesterday about The House of Fallen Timbers, I was thinking  about Henry David Thoreau, who built his cabin in the woods. I dug out an old quote about that, and got quite absorbed in a passing reference to Thoreau's concern with "how to get my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits." What are these "proper pursuits" that are not getting your living, and how much do you try to make time — to make freedom — for the things that are not living-getting? Do you even think in those terms? Perhaps you see getting your living as your proper pursuit, and it involves no loss of freedom. But then why do you see it that way? If you did not see it that way, what would you see? What would be your proper pursuit if it was not doing your job for the purpose of making a living? Perhaps there is another way to make coffee.

But Meade's mud took me back to the comments on the "Fallen Timbers" post. In the comments over there, Milwaukee said:

Henry David Thoreau is much more impressive if one doesn't learn that his mum wondered [sic] out once a week to collect, and drop off, laundry. But he did give us some things to think about, and I have a few favorite quotes, attributable to him, which I mangle. Specifically, the one about 'want to live, so as when I came to die, find that I had not lived.' and the different drummer thang.

Ah, it hurt me to see him diminished like that, because Thoreau had a big effect on me as a teenager, when I was thinking about how I wanted to live — what my proper pursuit was. There was one quote in particular, not any of the ones Milwaukee mangled. It was something with a distinctive word — mud — which made it easy to Google.  I found it and wrote this in the comments on the "Fallen Timbers" post:

I was assigned to give the "invocation" at my high school graduation, and I based it on a Thoreau quote. Afterwards, some people — including a nun — criticized me for not making a more conventional prayer.

Now, I teach Religion and the Constitution in law school, including the case where the Supreme Court nixed all graduation prayers.

My rights were soooo violated, and I was only trying to share a Thoreau quote that impressed me.

And now I share Thoreau quotes with all the world.

This was the quote:

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business."

Are you going about your business?

"He gets drilled at the 22-yard line! What a stick!"

So says the ESPN announcer at the Penn State/Nebraska game — not noticing the accidental double entendre. Earlier they played this statement by Penn State's new president...

[VIEW VIDEO HERE.]

... and they had a reporter reporting from outside of Joe Paterno's house. They showed that earlier, 2 men came up and knelt down to pray — each in a manly on-one-knee stance. I'm pretty sure they were not praying for the kids. They were praying for Joe Paterno!

ADDED: Penn State should be super-careful what music they choose to blast over the public address system. Ridiculous to play "Tell Me Something Good":

You ain't got no kind of feeling inside
I got something that will sure 'nuff set your stuff on fire
You refuse to put anything before your pride
I got something that will knock all your pride aside...
Problem is you ain't been loved like you should
What I got to give will sure 'nuff do you good

NOTE: I am not finding anything funny here. I'm demanding more circumspection from ESPN and Penn State.

JFK, the bookworm.

"He was a voracious reader who brought books with him into the bathtub, and even tried to read at meals and while doing his tie."

From the Jackie tapes. Also, he changed into his pajamas before taking a midday nap and, each evening, he knelt by the side of the bed to say his prayers. Went to confession too:

As president, he occasionally slipped into a confession booth in Palm Beach, Fla., "like anyone would," she said, with a Secret Service agent holding a place in line for him and the priest never knowing he'd just had the president in the confessional.

Can we get some fact-checking on this stuff?

Presidential prayer demeanor.

Head bowed/head uplifted.

Would this be a better picture if Michelle Obama's head did not appear to be a bulbous extension of Obama's head? And if Bush's head didn't seem to be a weight hanging from Obama's neck? At first I thought yes, but now I think it's utterly fascinating, symbolically and graphically. Note that we only see Obama's body, so the other 2 heads seem like growths on that body. His wife would pull him back, perhaps with excessive braininess, and his predecessor would pull him down, with all the regrets and burdens of the past. With effort, he lifts up his head...

But you, LORD, are a shield around me, my glory, the One who lifts my head high.

That's not the Psalm Obama read at the ceremony, which was Psalm 46. This is Psalm 3.

LORD, how many are my foes!
How many rise up against me!
Many are saying of me,
“God will not deliver him.”...

Arise, LORD! Deliver me, my God!
Strike all my enemies on the jaw; break the teeth of the wicked.

Lord, take these sons of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong.

"There exists a visceral John Wayne kinship between Israelis and Texans, and Rick Perry gets it."

"As a Jewish cowboy (or “Juusshh,” as we say in Texas)" Kinky Friedman says "Hell, yes!" he'd vote for Rick Perry.

[Rick Perry has] visited Israel on many more occasions than Obama, who’s been there exactly zero times as president. If I were Obama I wouldn’t go either. His favorability rating in Israel once clocked in at 4 percent. Say what you will about the Israelis, but they are not slow out of the chute. They know who their friends are. On the topic of the Holy Land, there remains the little matter of God. God talks to televangelists, football coaches, and people in mental hospitals. Why shouldn’t he talk to Rick Perry? In the spirit of Joseph Heller, I have a covenant with God. I leave him alone and he leaves me alone. If, however, I have a big problem, I ask God for the answer. He tells Rick Perry. And Rick tells me.

(Via Instapundit.)

What's the Joseph Heller quote he's channeling?

1. "'And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways,' Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. 'There's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else, He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about - a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a supreme being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when he robbed old people of their power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?'"

2. "God does have this self-serving habit of putting all blame for His own mistakes on other people, doesn't He? He picks someone arbitrarily, unbidden, right out of the blue so to speak, and levies upon them tasks of monumental difficulty for which we don't always measure up in every particular, then charges US for HIS error in selecting imperfectly. He tends to forget that we are no more infallible than He is."

3. "Now THERE'S a hollow state to be in, isn't it — to believe in God and get no sign that He's there."

Help me out here.

Or maybe thisis a better place to look.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation lacks standing to challenge the President's proclamation of a "national day of prayer."

And so, probably, does everyone else, says the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals (PDF). A "feeling of exclusion" or "alienation" is not the "injury in fact" required by Article III of the Constitution. The panel distinguished cases involving a religious display that induced plaintiffs to What did provide standing, we held, is that the plaintiffs "alter[] their daily commute...incurring costs in both time and money."

We talked about this case a year ago when the district judge, Barbara Crabb (here in Madison) issued an injunction barring the proclamation, saying "the government has taken sides on a matter that must be left to individual conscience." The new decision doesn't reach the merits of the case; standing is a threshold issue. But you can tell what the court thought of the Establishment Clause question:

A President frequently calls on citizens to do things that they prefer not to do—to which, indeed, they may be strongly opposed on political or religious grounds.... [No] (sensible) person [would]  suppose that a court could take a blue pencil to a President’s inaugural address or State of the Union speech and remove statements that may offend some members of the audience. President Lincoln’s second inaugural address, likely the greatest speech ever made by an American President, mentions God seven times and prayer three times, including the sentence: “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.” The address is chiseled in stone at the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall. An argument that the prominence of these words injures every citizen, and that the Judicial Branch could order them to be blotted out, would be dismissed as preposterous.

The Judicial Branch does not censor a President’s speech....