Michael Shermer, publisher of SKEPTIC on The Colbert Report

"Being interviewed (if that’s what you can call it) by the inimitable Stephen Colbert was one of the wilder experiences of my career. I would imagine by now that most readers of eSKEPTIC know that Comedy Central’s hit series The Colbert Report features the comedian Stephen Colbert playing a role that is largely a parody of Bill O’Reilly and The O’Reilly Factor. Exaggerating the extremes of the conservative position on nearly everything, Colbert gets in his hilarious digs by arguing against liberals and liberalism. Well, words don’t do the show justice. You just have to see it. Anyway, I was on last Tuesday night. The show is taped in New York. Stephen was good enough to come by the green room (they’re never green, by the way) to introduce himself and explain, “You know, I play a complete idiot on the show, so just try to debunk me like you would any idiot.” (This introduction was very unusual. I’ve been on Larry King, Bill Maher, Oprah, and Dennis Miller, all several times each, and never once have any of them ever spoken to me before or after the show. The funniest was the first time I was on Dennis Miller’s show — I didn’t see him in person until they plopped me in the chair next to him during a commercial break, and when the cameras started rolling he turned to me and said “Sherms! How you doin’?”, like we were old pals going way back.) After Stephen left, the producer came in to review about a dozen questions that Stephen might ask, emphasizing that he might not ask any of them, or that he might start with the first one and then just wing it. That’s exactly what happened. The first question asked me to prove that I was the publisher of Skeptic magazine, and we were off and running from there, as you’ll see in this clip. It was also one of the more difficult interviews I’ve done as he is quite verbally facile, aggressive, and so damn funny that it was hard to stop laughing and try to get in just a couple of points. At least I didn’t throw water on him, which Richard Branson did the next night, another clip well worth watching (they are available on Comedy Central’s web page.)"

WATCH the video > > >

Stephen Colbert's Website

* 2000 Marks the Beginning of the Post-American Era ~ The Bush Administration

Letter from France
August 27, 2007

The Human Bomb

LETTER FROM FRANCE about French president Nicolas Sarkozy. To understand Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been President of France for three months, it helps to know the story of the human bomb. In 1993, when Sarkozy was mayor of Neuilly, he went into a nursery school where a man strapped in…

by Adam Gopnik

Excerpt:

"He [Sarkozy] continued, “With America, he wants the normal relations we’ve always had. But he is capable of candor there, too. When Sarkozy met Condoleezza Rice, she said, ‘What can I do for you?’ And he said, bluntly, ‘Improve your image in the world. It’s difficult when the country that is the most powerful, the most successful—that is, of necessity, the leader of our side—is one of the most unpopular countries in the world. It presents overwhelming problems for you and overwhelming problems for your allies. So do everything you can to improve the way you’re perceived—that’s what you can do for me.’ I think it’s entirely possible; the reservoir of good will has been drained somewhat, but it is far from dry. Look how much the image of France has changed in the United States in eight weeks.”

"Sarkozy’s decision to spend his summer vacation in New Hampshire and have lunch with George W. Bush in Maine was widely regarded in France not as obsequiousness but as pure human-bombism: walk right up to the man considered dangerous and disarm him by talking calmly over a hot dog. The effect aimed for was not so much audacity as anomie: Sarkozy is trying to remove the drama from Franco-American relations by making them “normal.” I’m in the neighborhood—let’s have lunch. The larger, implicit point is that the threatening thing is not really that threatening.

"The catastrophe in Iraq has had an unlooked-for effect: not to stoke anti-Americanism in a new generation but to make America seem almost marginal. For almost two hundred years, Americanization in Europe has been synonymous with modernization—that’s why the Statue of Liberty stands in New York Harbor, as a gift of the Third French Republic, the fraught state that appeared after Louis-Napoleon’s Second Empire failed. It was a gift not from a complacent old world to a nascent new one but from a newborn republic to one that, after its civil war, was firm and coherent. The point wasn’t that Europe would not abandon us; it was that we would not abandon old Europe to the despots.

"Now, for the first time, it’s possible to imagine modernization as something independent of Americanization: when people in Paris talk about ambitious kids going to study abroad, they talk about London. (Americans have little idea of the damage done by the ordeal that a routine run through immigration at J.F.K. has become for Europeans, or by the suspicion and hostility that greet the most anodyne foreigners who come to study or teach at our scientific and educational institutions.) When people in Paris talk about manufacturing might, they talk about China; when they talk about tall buildings, they talk about Dubai; when they talk about troubling foreign takeovers, they talk about Gazprom. The Sarkozy-Gordon Brown-Merkel generation is not unsympathetic to America, but America is not so much the primary issue for them, as it was for Blair and Chirac, in the nineties, when America was powerful beyond words. To a new leadership class, it sometimes seems that America is no longer the human bomb you have to defuse but the nut you walk away from.

"What Brown, Merkel, and Sarkozy all have in common is that they do not want to be defined by their response to America—either unduly faithful, as with Blair, or unduly hostile, as Chirac became. Instead, as Levitte says, they all want to normalize relations with a great power that is no longer the only power. Its military weakness has been exposed in Iraq, its economic weakness by the rise of the euro, and its once great cultural magnetism has been diminished by post-9/11 paranoia and insularity. America has recovered from worse before, and may do so again. But it is also possible that the election of Nicolas Sarkozy may be seen not as the start of a new pro-American moment in Europe but as a marker of the beginning of the post-American era."

* Religion & the 2008 Presidential Candidates ~ What's Wrong With This Picture?

Faiths of the candidates

"The 2008 presidential candidates were asked what their religion is, whether they belong to a particular church and how often they attend services.

"Like the majority of Americans, all the candidates are Christians. Seven are Roman Catholic, three are Methodist, three are Baptist, one is Episcopalian, one is Presbyterian, one is Mormon and one describes himself simply as Christian."

DEMOCRATS

Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden, Jr.: Roman Catholic. He attends services at either St. Patrick's or St. Joseph's in Wilmington, Del., when his schedule permits.

New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton: A "practicing Methodist who attends church as often as possible."

Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd: Catholic. He attends services in Washington, Connecticut and when traveling.

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards: Methodist. He is a member of the Edenton Street United Methodist Church in Raleigh, N.C., but is looking with his wife, Elizabeth, for a church near their new home in Chapel Hill.

Ohio Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich: Catholic. He is a member of St. Aloysius in Cleveland but attends services "not often."

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama: Christian. He attends Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, and goes to services "frequently, when at home on Sundays."

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson: Catholic. He attends St. Francis Cathedral Parish in Santa Fe, N.M., "on a fairly regular basis, and attends services on the road when possible."

REPUBLICANS

Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback: Catholic. He attends two services on Sundays, Mass in the morning at Christ the King Catholic Church in Topeka and then services at Topeka Bible (Evangelical Christian) with his family. "He tries to go to daily Mass whenever he can, wherever he is. When in Washington, he attends St. Joseph's on Capitol Hill."

Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore: Methodist. He is a member of River Road Methodist in Richmond, Va., and "attends his home church as often as his travel schedule allows."

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani: Catholic. "The mayor's personal relationship with God is private and between him and God."

California Gov. Duncan Hunter: Baptist. He is a member of Trinity Baptist Church in El Cajon, Calif., and attends services almost every Sunday but usually elsewhere because he's often traveling.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Hucabee: Southern Baptist. He is a member of the Church at Rock Creek in Little Rock, Ark., and attends services "every Sunday he's in town."

Arizona Sen. John McCain: Episcopalian, but his four youngest children are Baptist, and he attends the North Phoenix Baptist Church when he is home.

Texas Rep. Ron Paul: Baptist. He is a member of the First Baptist Church in Lakewood, Texas.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney: Mormon, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He attends services weekly at a Mormon temple in Belmont, Mass.

Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo: Presbyterian. He is a member of the Cherry Hills Community Church in Highland, Colo., and attends services "every week I am home."

Former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson: Catholic. He is a member of St. Peter's in Madison, Wis., and attends services weekly. Source: Associated Press For additional health information, visit OhioHealth.

Columbus Dispatch

* "God's Warriors" ~ with Christiane Amanpour

Cross-reference to original posting: METAXY

CNN's Christiane Amanpour says she believes the world has entered an "age of religious politics."

CNN.com asked users to send questions to Amanpour as part of "CNN Presents" documentary, "God's Warriors." Read the Questions & Answers.

About Christiane Amanpour

* Gerda Lerner ~ Feminist/Historian, Author, Teacher, Jewish Atheist

Feminist/Historian, Born April 30, 1920 in Vienna, Austria.

Gerda Lerner is one of the founders of the field of women's history and African-American history. She was a founding member of the National Organization for Women and is a former president of the Organization of American Historians. Lerner has played a key role in the development of women’s history curricula at Long Island University (1965-1967), at Sarah Lawrence College from 1968 to 1979 (where she established the nation's first Women's History graduate program), at Columbia University (where she was a co-founder of the Seminar on Women), and since 1980 as Robinson Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is a professor emerita of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a visiting scholar at Duke University.

Lerner's books "have been a staple of women's studies classes for decades. In her collection of essays, Why History Matters, Lerner described her experiences as a female Jewish atheist: 'More difficult and public was my refusal, four weeks before the appointed date, to go through with my Bar Mitzvah on the grounds that since I no longer believed in God nor in what was taught in religious instruction, it would be hypocritical for me to go through the ceremony. This provoked a family crisis, much noise, anger and pressure of various sorts, but in the end I prevailed. But more--I refused to set foot in a synagogue again and kept to that refusal for over fifty years.' Lerner links her experiences as an atheist with her eventual career choice as a historian. According to Lerner, "What is left to a Jew who refuses the religious community? Antisemitism and history."

Biography

Fireweed: A Political Autobiography,
Introduction and Chapter One

Books

• No Farewell (1955) an autobiographical novel
• The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Authority (1967)
• The Woman in American History [ed.] (1971)
• Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (1972)
• The Female Experience: An American Documentary (1976)
• A Death of One's Own (1978/2006)
• The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (1979)
• Teaching Women's History (1981)
• Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey (1982)
• The Creation of Patriarchy (1986)
• Why History Matters (1997)
• The Rise of Feminist Consciousness (1993)
• Scholarship in Women's History Rediscovered & New (1994)
• Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (2003)