Mollie Z. Hemingway has a fascinating piece in the Wall Street Journal:

“What Americans Really Believe,” a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

Also, she shows that higher education contributes to belief in superstition! You have got to read the whole article, which includes the fact that comedian Bill Maher, for all of his mockery of Christianity as irrational, himself disbelieves in medicine, vaccination, and the existence of germs.

Steven Pearlstein discusses the new takeover of the economy by the federal government, drawing the inevitable political conclusion:

It would be hard to find a superlative that would overstate how much the parameters and contours of American economic policy have been reshaped over the past two weeks.

The degree of government intervention into the workings of the private marketplace is unprecedented. Three giant financial institutions taken over. Government purchases of vast quantities of hard-to-sell assets from banks, investment banks and anyone else whose demise might threaten the financial system. Trading outlawed in an entire class of securities. A government guarantee extended to a whole new category of investments.

Laws have been stretched until they are barely recognizable. . . .

But in terms of the political economy, there is little doubt we are witnessing a once-in-a-generation sea change. It will no longer be an easy applause line for a politician to declare that government is the problem and that markets always know better than regulators and politicians. With Bear Stearns and AIG as their rallying cry, citizens will demand the same kind of financial security and protection as bondholders of big banks and counter-parties of hedge funds. Debates about the competitiveness of U.S. financial markets will focus less on how little regulated they are and more on how much protection and transparency they offer to investors. It will be harder to deny essential government agencies the talent, money and respect they need to do the job right.

An interesting comparison can be made between Hurricane Katrina and the current financial crisis, which symbolically has now stranded a number of rich investors on the roofs of their mansions, crying out to the government to be rescued.

When we look back, we may find that this crisis, like Katrina, was a turning point in public perceptions and expectations of government — about its competence in dealing with the inevitable crises that occur and its ability to take steps ahead of time to assure that the damage is limited and the most vulnerable are protected.

Uh, so we want the government that did such a good job handling Hurricane Katrina to handle the entire economic storm? That does not bode well. The point, though, is that big government is back in vogue.

Barack Obama when a state legislator opposed a measure to protect infants who survive abortion. He really did. (According to FactCheck, the bill applied only to fetuses that were unlikely to survive and that it wouldn’t be “infanticide” unless a person considered an aborted fetus an infant, which Obama doesn’t, but I do, but the facts are confirmed.) So abortion survivor Giana Jessen did an ad calling him on it. Now he is running a counter-ad calling the ad “vile” and a lie. But it isn’t a lie! See here for the various ads. Here is Giana’s response to his attack on her:

“Mr. Obama is clearly blinded by political ambition given his attack on me this week. All I asked of him was to do the right thing: support medical care and protection for babies who survive abortion – as I did 31 years ago. He voted against such protection and care four times even though the U.S. Senate voted 98-0 in favor of a bill identical to the one Obama opposed. In the words of his own false and misleading ad, his position is downright vile. Mr. Obama said at the recent Saddleback Forum that the question of when babies should get human rights was above his pay grade. Such vacillation and cowardice would have left me to die if his policies were in place when I was born. Thank God they were not.”

I know that Christians who support Obama say that the president really can’t do much about abortion, so it really doesn’t matter. But doesn’t a person’s beliefs about life issues tell you much about that person’s character and moral convictions? Not to mention that the president’s appointment of Supreme Court justices IS going to have an impact on abortions.