I'm not saying there aren't people who treat salvation like a get out of jail free card. I'm just saying they should pay attention to what the Bible says. The passage I linked was written to the church, i.e. people who had already been "saved." The Bible (and I'm talking about the New Testament, mostly the epistles here) never says that anyone will be sinless from the moment of conversion, but it does say that salvation, what the evangelicals refer to as "being saved" will produce some sort of internal change that SHOULD have some external manifestations. Some of these manifestations are listed by the apostle Paul as the "fruit of the Spirit" (a reference to the doctrine that the Holy Spirit indwells believers, ending their slavery to their sinful natures) in the same passage.

A basic understanding of theology confirms that "salvation" is not a get out of jail free card. On the contrary, a person who has been reconciled to God should be more concerned about their behavior than anybody else, because the core of salvation is a recognition of God's love and a desire to reciprocate by acting according to His dictates. But of course this is a lot to write when I could just quote Paul again:

Romans 6:1-2:

"What shall we say then? Shall we gon on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?"

Now, I would never claim to know whether Governor Sanford has been reconciled to God; judge not and all of that. But reports of his home life, his wife not speaking to him and such, should certainly cause him to reevaluate the quality of his relationship with God. Whether he is actually in the process of doing that or just engaging in spin, who knows.

Anyways that's enough theology for now. Back to the political bickering, which I also enjoy greatly.

"You are almost as bad as Islamists."

Yes, because if you read the last few things I wrote, I clearly intend to forcibly convert, and failing that kill, everybody here.

Of course that's not the position of all Islamists, just a few violent extremists. But if religion is the root of all the world's problems, there's no reason to distinguish between religions, or differing interpretations of the same religion, so hate away I suppose.

I believe it was Hamdan. He took no part in the decision in the Supreme Court because he had heard it in the D.C. Circuit. Several of the facts are similar: Roberts was on a three-judge panel that reached a unanimous verdict, and it was overturned in large part by Supremes with different ideologies. The differences are trivial: Roberts didn't write the opinion that SCOTUS overturned, he simply joined it; the Roberts panel overturned the district court while Sotomayor's opinion affirmed the decision below. And of course Roberts was there and recused himself, instead of being reversed before he was confirmed.

Per the trolls, whatever decision the Supreme Court reaches is correct. I guess Roberts should be pretty embarrassed that he got that one wrong, huh?

But seeing just parts of the movie Frontier(s) made me reexamine my attitudes towards "extreme horror" in general. Violence done well can be pretty damn compelling, and make you think about how you reacted to what you saw.

Of course, that assumes you're the kind of person who thinks about those things. I'm not sure many fans of the genre fit that description, although I have read some pretty good writing about the Hostel series (though I still have no desire to see either one).

Wow, that was a lot of qualifying statments.

(to be read in the voice of David Caruso)

Frank, doesn't Obama realize that a good number of us voted for him because he promised a new age of transparency? Doesn't he realize that when his actions fail so miserably to live up to his rhetoric, a good number of us...

(puts on sunglasses)

...won't get fooled again?

YYYEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You, sir, have a way with words.

So how come Bill Clinton never went bankrupt? Must have made a ton of money off all his shady endlessly-investigable deals.

Yeah, investigable. I can make up words too.

This is what I got from Borat:

1. Frat boys are stupid.

2. Most people don't want to see a fat guy and a skinny guy wrestle naked.

3. Pooping in a bag and bringing it to a dinner table is bad manners, and your southern hosts won't like it. Really? I had no fucking clue. Thanks for illuminating that, SBC!

4. You can whip up rodeo attendees by talking about how awesome America is. Again, I had no clue.

Most humor is mean-spirited, but not everything mean-spirited is funny. And I already knew that some Americans are ignorant and vicious, I didn't need you running around like an asshole for two hours to see that. When you dropped the bag and the chicken squawked, that was funny. Another hundred or so good jokes and Borat would have been worth the reviews and the price of admission.

Oh, and most of the anti-semitism was initiated by SBC himself. If people went along with it, shame on them or whatever, but the most "anti-semitic" parts of Borat were scripted.

Bruce's Willis supposedly appeared in the crappy erotic thriller (which is the just best name for a genre ever) "The Color of Night." I've only seen it on cable, and not all of it, so I don't know for a fact if this is true or not. "Sideways" has probably the most hilarious use of penis ever, although I did like "Forgetting Sarah Marshall."

Isn't there some quality (and highly disturbing) Dafoe in the new "Antichrist?"