A bit of friendly advice, which I hope you'll take as such: I really enjoyed the GRITtv segment and learned from it, but... Glen, Glen, Glen, if you are going to keep appearing on video you have to learn that it is a VISUAL medium. Meaning: $100 invested in a microphone and earpiece that don't make you look like you're living in Mom's basement (or bring up memories of Dukakis in a tank helmet) will go a long way. So will $50 for some decent lighting. And getting a few professional pointers on TV makeup, the sort every half-bit weatherman in the US wears, wouldn't be a bad thing, either. Seriously. Treating the medium as what it is (visual) isn't the same as selling out. I mean, it's either that or have them play random clips of rocket launchings every time you open your mouth.

Out of morbid curiosity, I checked out "Conservapedia" on the fun time-waster Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends). Compared with Wikipedia, Conservapedia doesn't even register. But it does a little better when matched up against that old standby, Britannica, being outranked by a factor of only 16.2 to 1 (number of searches). (Britannica meanwhile is now outranked by Wikipedia by 164:1, so theoretically Conservapedia is crushed by the evil liberal free-source encyclopedia 2,657:1.)

More interesting is when people search for the different encyclopedias. Tracking the number of searches for both Wikipedia and Britannica, you see a perfect reflection of the school year cycle: a slight dip around Easter (spring break), a big dip over the summer months, a deep but short dip right at the end of December. Conservapedia, by contrast, seems to reflect only the news cycle: up when an article comes out about it, gently declining otherwise. Its biggest day was the day it was announced in early 2007, and it has been almost all downhill since then. Clearly there are no students flocking to the site for last-minute help.

My guess is that the bible stunt is another soon-to-fail attempt to attract eyeballs to a dismally mistaken web venture.

I posted earlier before reading the paragraph that notes:

The site also wants to root out what it calls "later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic," like the story of the woman accused of adultery...

This took my breath away. (Not literally, just metaphorically.) Are they so ignorant that they do not realize these "later-inserted passages" were only identified as such by liberal 19th-century bible critics? The same liberal critics who are excoriated by 20th and 21st-century conservative "literalists"? Or are they just intellectually dishonest to a truly staggering degree?

(Well, probably both, but still...)

My guess is that this project, in addition to being a pointless attempt to attract some attention, any attention, to Conservapedia, is secondarily an attempt to reconcile Ayn Rand libertarian conservatism (Rand was quite anti-Christian and her manifesto/novels were anti-New Testament parables) with the second leg of the tottering conservative coalition, the biblical literalists. Good luck with that.

Honestly, I don't get the constant harping by seemingly almost everyone (certainly everyone at NPR and the NYT, and at least half the columnists at Salon) about how Obama doesn't "deserve the Nobel Peace Prize -- yet."

(Note, I leave aside Greenwald's completely different argument against Obama's receiving the prize on the grounds of his upholding of Bush-era human rights violations, an argument which does bear some merit but is irrelevant to this discussion. In any case, not every recipient has been ideologically pure or 100% dedicated to peace and human rights -- de Klerk? Kissinger? Sadat and Begin?)

They've been handing out Peace Prizes for 108 years. If any of the awardees had "deserved it" by the criteria I've been hearing, then we would have had universal peace by now, surely.

Where were the same critics when the Dalai Lama got the prize in 1989 for "his struggle for the liberation of Tibet"? Why no complaints that the Nobel committee didn't wait until Tibet had achieved liberation before granting that premature prize?

Where were they in 1991 when Aung San Suu Kuy received it "for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights"? Why no cries that they should have waited until the people Burma actually had gained democracy and their human rights?

The Peace prize is about aspirations, leadership, setting the right direction or at least pointing the right way. Whether or not Obama ultimately succeeds in every endeavor (and how likely would that be?), he began his term with a clear show of international leadership and has started moving us in the right direction. He got the world's attention and changed the world's topic of conversation from "what insane thing will the US do next?" to "if only he succeeds...." Maybe that's not enough for you, but that is what the prize committee was looking for, and they found it.