Here I thought I was turning my girlfriend on by doing silly things like taking romantic walks with her and going to concerts with her and telling her how beautiful and amazing she is!

All this time I should have just been driving around in an expensive sports car.

There is something going on with those (what did one LW call them... penis-mobiles?), but it has nothing to do with women. Men (at least some of them) just like to compete with themselves, whether or not they are married and not in the market for impressing women. Every woman I've ever met is more likely to roll her eyes at a "hot" car cruising down the street than get all hot and bothered. Conversely, the only guys I've ever known who love expensive cars get more turned on by listing their vehicle's stats than thinking about the girls their car could get them.

Is because abortion sucks. Seriously. All discussion of legality and morality aside, there is no way you can say that abortion is an inherently good or light-hearted thing. Abortion is physically and emotionally taxing... not only for the aborted fetus, obviously, but for the pregnant woman as well. The idea that you can turn abortion into a sterilized medical procedure is ridiculous.

No one mentions abortion in these light-hearted movies for the same reason that no one mentions rape or genocide or necrophilia or child porn. Because they are ugly things, ugly things that a lot of people have experience with. Why ruin a perfectly good comedy with brutal realism?

Because bio-fuel comes from corn, increasing its consumption will drive up the demand (and therefore price) of corn. Food based on corn meal will become more and more expensive, and other foodstuffs will rise in price to 'compete.'

In other words we are simply shooting ourselves in the foot. The rising price of food most deeply affects people who live from paycheck to paycheck in the first place... that is, people in poverty, or close to it. Not only is bio-fuel environmentally inefficient but it will hurt our lower classes as well.

Stanley Hauerwas, a disciple of John Howard Yoder, purports that Christians should abstain from all forms of violence, including voting, because to vote (in this country) is to inherently endorse the commonly-accepted American notion that violence is an acceptable form of foreign policy.

There are a lot of things our pastors should be talking about from the pulpits. Who to vote for is not one of them. American Christians should render unto Caesar what it Caesar's... not try to become the next corrupt emperor. Jesus spent his time with prostitutes and destitutes and prisoners and outcasts and the physically handicapped. He didn't rub elbows with governors and politicians... he was executed by them.

A few Christians in this strange country of ours understand that the state is Rome and not the Church, and therefore try their best to ignore it. Quite a few Christians suffer the state to place before them two evils, and hope to choose the lesser of those by voting for or supporting candidates and policies that might resemble true Christian love and charity. But unfortunately, all too many "Christians" are just so many more mindless Roman sheep, listening not to the covenant of the God of Mercy but to the insidious voices of earthly power that only use faith as a justification for their own greed and arrogance. Mike Huckabee might believe he is serving God by trying to become Caesar, and a lot of ignorant Christians might believe they serve God by voting for him, but that doesn't make it so. These people are simply getting ready to kill Christ all over again, every day.

I am amazed that people keep asserting that Obama will be the only candidate who will change the way things are done.

Uh, says who? Him? And you take him at his word?

What has he done, other than speak pretty speeches, that would back up such an assertion? Nothing. I mean that quite literally: The thing he has done is to do nothing. He misses important votes, stands up to no one in his position as senator, completely misses the opportunity to gain real, hands-on experience with foreign policy in his position as chair of the European senate commission (as was mentioned in another Salon article not too long ago).

My disbelief at rabid Obama supports is similar to my disbelief for Ron Paul supporters. Both seem to latch onto their candidates as saviors, as heralds of a new era of politics, without actually demonstrating how their candidates will go about really improving things. Neither seem to know much about their candidates except that the candidates like to talk about change and hope.

I doubt you have a graduate degree in theology, because you mentioned earlier that your got "your theology" from the gospels and the letters of Paul, but if you knew squat about what theology is you would understand that the gospels are inherently non-theological. Paul arguably has a theology, but the gospels are narratives intended to create converts, not to systematically examine the substance and accidence of the divine and its relationship to humanity.

If you had ever read the gospels you might have gotten the part where Jesus loved the poor and oppressed and stood up against the establishment. You might have gotten the bit where he said that those who live by the sword die by it. You might have gotten the bit where it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven. You may even have gotten the part that when people conspired to kill Jesus, he did not bulk up his army or prepare a surge or a preemptive strike to protect his foreign interests. So how you can possibly contrive a so-called Christian justification for supporting violent, arrogant, self-indulgent aristocrats like George W. Bush is totally beyond me.