Shocking does not mean significant

The media has been all agog about the defeat of Eric Cantor in his primary race and drawing all manner of sweeping conclusions. Is the Tea Party coming back to life after everyone declared it dead? Does this signal the end of any attempt at immigration reform? Does this mean that any Republican who deviates even the slightest from unwavering opposition to anything that president Obama and the Democratic party propose is now likely to be defeated?
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Honest trailer for The Wolf of Wall Street

I recently panned the film The Wolf of Wall Street. The people who produce the funny Honest Trailers series have created something that gives a much better view of that film than the trailers produced by the film’s producers. These parody trailers are funnier when you have seen the film. They are funny even if you thought the film was good but are funnier if you thought it was terrible.
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Speaking at the PA Atheist conference

I have been invited to be one of the speakers at the Pennsylvania state Atheist/Humanist Conference to be held in Pittsburgh from Friday, August 29 to Sunday, August 31 which also happens to be the Labor Day weekend with Monday as a holiday. It looks like it will be a good meeting and I hope that readers of this blog will try to attend and if they do, please introduce yourself to me.
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‘A Room For Death’ Card trick

I love seeing card tricks. As someone whose small motor skills are pretty poor, it delights me to see the dexterity with which these magicians handle cards, making them move around in complex ways using just one hand. The catch with watching videos of card tricks is that you can never be sure that you are not seeing editing tricks instead of actual card tricks. But assuming that there is no such funny business going on here, this is a pretty good one.
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We should all be as ‘dead broke’ as the Clintons

My ridiculing of Hillary Clinton’s attempt to say she could empathize with the plight of all the people who are struggling economically and claim solidarity with them by saying that when she and Bill Clinton left the White House they were ‘dead broke’, led to some pushback by some in the comments who claimed that they were in fact poor at that time because of all the legal bills they racked up defending themselves while in office.
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Maybe they should rename themselves the ‘Christian Party’?

I knew that Eric Cantor was Jewish and that his defeat resulted in the loss of one of the highest-ranking Jews in congress. What I had not realized was that he was the only non-Christian among all the Republican members in the US Senate and the House of Representatives. In other words, when it came to religious diversity in that party, Cantor was pretty much it.
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Bergdahl craziness

The huge controversy over the exchange of five prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay priosn (which should have been shut down a long time ago) for a US soldier Bowe Bergdahl captured in Afghanistan has been quite incredible. Once again, we have the spectacle of people seemingly deciding their position on one issue by their views of something else, in this case whether the swap reflects well on president Obama, and then using that to drive their message.
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