A recent poll showed that about 18% of Americans think that President Obama follows the Muslim faith, and only one in three identifies him as a Christian. During the campaign, his attendance at Reverend Wright’s church, a Christian church, was a significant issue. that might have driven home the point that he was Christian. In his books and interviews Obama declares he is a Christian. If that isn’t enough, Obama drinks alcohol, which Muslims do not. I suppose no one knows with absolute certainty what is in President Obama’s heart-of-hearts, but there is no objective evidence to claim he is a Muslim. So where do people get the idea?

Zoning laws place enormous power in the hands of local authorities. Suppose I’d like to convert the garage on my house in a residential neighborhood into a convenience store. Surely I have a fundamental right to operate a business and to make a living. My convenience store would sell milk that parents would buy for their children. Surely children have a right to be provided with milk. Yet zoning laws prohibit my converting my garage to a convenience store. The local government’s right to regulate the location of stores trumps my right to make a living and the rights of neighborhood children to conveniently get milk.

There was a micro-story in the news this week about a new tax imposed on tanning salons. The 10% tax is supposed to generate $2.7 billion over ten years to help pay for the Obama health care legislation. Why tax tanning salons? Because tanning is related to skin cancer, so it ought to be discouraged by taxation. Everyone knows that whatever is taxed is discouraged, right? But when the revenues from the tax are calculated, the assumption is that there will be no effect, so revenues will be reaped as if no one is deterred. That’s the way tax revenues are usually calculated, which explains why there are usually shortfalls. These days, having computers and such, revenues ought to projected taking tax avoidance into account.

President Clinton started off with a hard left agenda, but after the resounding Congressional losses in 1994, he moved to a much more centrist position, working with Dole and Gingrich on free trade and welfare reform. With a similar prospect facing Democrats this November, will Obama also move towards the center? While it is possible, —one never knows for sure— it is unlikely. Unlike Clinton, Obama has no basis for governing other than ideological dogma. It’s the only game he knows. Moreover, the executive branch has been given so much power to make its own laws there is no compelling need for Congress to act to advance his agenda.

Political campaigns generate sound bites as the preferred mode of communication. Few people are motivated to listen to long-winded speeches, so the goal is to simplify messages in the extreme. Politicians have been way ahead of Twitter. Television news is complicit in favoring one-line easily-digestible capsules of semi-information. The news people suppose that viewers have the attention span of gerbils, and so they must continually get on with something else. The news people are probably right, but there are stories that simply cannot be reduced to sound bites. The oil spill disaster is a case in point. The scope and complexity of the problem defies the sound bite treatment either by politicians or the news media.

People are fond of the notion that “you can prove anything with statistics.” That’s not true, but it often takes deep understanding to find errors in statistical reasoning. Even simple problems can be difficult to solve correctly, and when it comes to complex problems the opportunities for error multiply. The simple problem I have in mind is called “The Monty Hall Problem” and the complex problem is unraveling the errors in the derivation of the global warming Hockey Stick. The first is discussed in The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives, a superb introduction to statistical theory by physicist Leonard Mlodinow. The second is the subject of The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science, a careful exposition by A.W. Montford of the errors made by climate scientists. Together they explain a great deal of what is bogus in modern science.

The Gulf oil spill is producing two crises. The obvious one is the disaster with coastal fisheries, but it poses an ideological crisis as well. For liberals, government is supposed to be the solution to all problems. The oil spill is a big problem. So if the government is impotent in solving it, what does that say about the possibilities of government? If the oil spill is a problem that government cannot solve, might there be other such problems? That thought is too horrible to contemplate

I have yet to hear a call for a boycott of Arizona that made an accurate reference to the Arizona law that is at issue. The full text of the law is here The new Arizona law will require that if someone is stopped by police for other legal reasons, and the person also presents other legal reasons for doubting their citizenship status, that the police must then check citizenship status with the Federal Authorities.

Calls to kill President Bush were common in the war protests a few years ago, but they were rarely featured by broadcast television networks or big-city newspapares. One collections of Bush death threats is on the blog Bin’s Corner. I searched the New York Times website and could not find a single archived article since 1981 about leftists protesters making death threats against Bush. Searching for “tea party racism” on The Time site provided 4760 references in just the past thirty days. Let’s just say the reporting is uneven.

Democrats are fond of reminding us that Obama made no secret of his radical leftist agenda when he ran for President. Conservatives are fond of replying that they saw it coming. What this exchange misses is the role that promises of transparency and bipartisanship played in the election. Independent voters did not react to the leftist agenda because Obama promised that whatever he did would be tempered by a process that exposed all of the political dealings and by the need to get Republicans to agree. He might or might not want to nationalize everything in sight, it was no matter because he would have to get many Republicans to agree. The claims of transparency and bipartisanship effectively moved Obama from the left to near the center of American politics.