Oh come on, Aloex! The standoff may have lasted for a few days, but it's only been a day since the rescue of Capt. Phillips. Hardly long enough to say that it's being overplayed. As for how much, if any, credit President Obama deserves for the favorable resolution...you know as well as the rest of us do that if this had happened on G.W. Bush's watch the right wing wouldn't have had no problem painting his participation in heroic terms. At the very least Obama seems to have understood and done what was necessary to allow the military on the scene to take appropriate action. So I'm not going to object if he gets a little pat on the back.

During the campaign Obama made a big point of saying that the president needed to be able to handle more than one thing at once. So shouldn't the media and the public be able to as well? The introduction of the White House dog shouldn't have to mean giving short shrift to the president's economic speech.

With all the coverage of these "tea party" protests I'm STILL not getting any real sense of the kind of numbers they're drawing. Does anybody have any solid information apart from Nordquist's questionable estimate of 1,000 at the one location?

And wasn't Sarkozy praising Obama rather effusively after their recent meetings? Makes me wonder what's going on. Really.

The explanations for incidents such as that at Columbine haven't been quite as simple as the liberals-say-it's-guns/conservatives-say-it's-video-games dichotemy that you attempt to set up and then refute. I seem to remember that a good deal of speculation centered around the idea that the perpetrators of such incidents are alienated from the society around them, isolated, not fitting in. Economic pressures can certainly play an important role in many cases, but to try to use that as the sole explanation is just another oversimplification. The truth is that there is no one single cause. Easy availability of guns, the violence of popular culture, social isolation, economic stress and broken relationships can all be involved to varying degrees in different examples. Oversimplifying the problem is not going to help much in trying to deal with it.

What strikes me is how presumptuous it is of her to assume that she would have won had she answered differently. I did happen to notice that Miss North Carolina, the eventual winner, received the highest score in the evening gown competition. (I wasn't paying that much attention to some of the earlier scores.) And that was before "the question" came up. So Miss California saying she feels like she really won just comes across as vain and perhaps a little arrogant.

Drat! I wanted to suggest using the photo of Rove for darts practice, but somebody beat me to it!

Anyway, congratulations, Alex!

Since NO blacks passed the test it's kind of hard not to question whether it was in fact free of bias. There's SOMETHING going on there. Maybe completely unintentional... but SOMETHING.

This was so much fun to read. I think my favorite part was the speculation about how, if some aliens were to land, most people would be happy to have Obama represent humanity, but if Bush were in office it would be "Mars Attacks!" Now, I am not someone who hangs on every report of a UFO sighting seeking proof that extraterrestrials have visited us. But I do believe that the universe is simply too vast for it to be credible that we are the only intelligent life in all the billions of galaxies that exist. I believe that other intelligent beings do exist somewhere out there, and that at some point we are going to be brought face to face with that reality. It's actually kind of fun to imagine that the time might be upon us and that maybe...just maybe...Obama might have been brought to power at this time specifically to deal with such an occasion. A little fantastic? Maybe. But, as I believe someone has said, the universe is stranger than we can imagine.

I saw a discussion on the Washington Post website based on the proposition that the real outrage regarding Obama's meal was that he ordered his burger done "medium well". Apparently the person who started the discussion thinks that's a choice for cretins. Personally, I say "Who cares how he likes his buger or what he likes on it?" It's all a matter of personal preference, not some kind of moral issue!

Actually, I can think of at least one reference to God in the original ST right off my head. It's in the episode where the Enterprise is being used to evaluate a new supercomputer, which its inventer claims will be able to run a starship on its own, making a human crew virtually irrelevent. Naturally, the experiment gets out of hand and the computer is about to destroy the other Federation vessels sent against it in what was supposed to be a test. Kirk is finally able to talk the computer into abandoning its attack because it had been made to duplicate the human thought processes of its inventor and therefore shared his belief that murder was "an offense against the laws of God and man".

Also, there was a strictly nondenominational chapel aboard the Enterprise, which was seen in the episode which started with Kirk about to perform the marriage of two crew members when they are interrupted by a red alert.

So, though the show rejected the imposition of religious belief or practice by those in authority I would maintain that there was a recognition of a fundamental spirituality in human nature and a respect for each individual's right to choose what they will believe and how they will practice it.