Ever want to meet Jeremy but never sure which coast he is on at the moment? Well, now is your chance! The Competitive Enterprise Institute is throwing a bash for Jeremy Wednesday at the Irish Channel in DC’s Chinatown (Editor: An Irish bar in Chinatown? Really? Yup.) It will celebrate the publication of his book, The Warm Bucket Brigade, as well as Jeremy’s 30th birthday and my first year as his guest blogger. Learn more about the event here. Buy Jeremy’s book here. Hear Jeremy’s velvety tones in this PSA. Check out his latest fashions here.

Technical difficulties prevented me from posting this column earlier, but Jeremy took a trip over the New America Foundation the other day to hear their solutions to the mortgage meltdown. What did he learn? That Fritz Hollings, the former senator from South Carolina, is still registers a “Dan Rather” on the sanity scale.

While top US banking and finance regulators were being grilled by Congress this week, the leftish New America Foundation held the “Economy in Turmoil” policy forum elsewhere on Capitol Hill. Tuesday’s gathering offered the mostly Democratic policy wonks and politicians a chance to say what they think has gone wrong, and how to fix it. Those folks who had been hoping that Democrats could somehow set things to right may now commence weeping.

New America’s Leo Hindery kicked off the first panel by talking about the “most expensive combined bailout in the nation’s history,” coming to about $1tn. Because of the complexity of the financial instruments involved, he said, “no amount of modeling was ever going to sufficiently see the future”. Nevertheless, regulators should have seen that coming and prevented it. Hindery hoped that Americans will have the good sense to “kick out the deregulators and let the regulators back in” in the November elections.

He admitted that any proposed new spending in the next Congress “will indeed compete with other spending”. Many of the items on the Republican and the Democratic wish lists (tax cuts and increased health spending) are now unaffordable. Rather than scale back expectations, Hindery simply pressed the case more vigorously, as did most of the panelists. One even went so far as to propose an additional trillion dollars of domestic spending. Nobody offered the slightest protest.

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National Journal financial columnist Bruce Stokes called for a “new American capitalism,” including a values-driven trade policy. Colourful lunchtime speaker and former South Carolina senator Fritz Hollings did him one better, saying that the US should “get out of the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war and get into the trade war”.

Hollings was unapologetic about his support for erecting new trade barriers. “This country was started on protectionism,” he argued, and no one challenged him. Hollings joked that the country would be a whole lot better off if someone would just “kill all the economists”. At least, I think he was joking.

The marvelous Mollie Ziegler-Hemingway has a wonderfully counter-intuitive column in the Wall Street Journal. In it, she notes that the biggest believers in the supernatural and paranormal are … self-described atheists:

“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.

The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?

The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.

Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama’s former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin’s former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.

Ziegler cites skeptical writer Martin Gardner to suggest that as belief in traditional religions fail, the irreligious turn to “pseudoscience, cults and superstition” to explain the unexplainable. This sounds right to me.

Many of the serious atheists I have known (especially, interestingly enough, the women) at some point took up some new age tomfoolery or Oprah-esque philosophy that demanded belief in spirits and energy levels and such. They were also the most likely to contact me about the latest weird Internet rumor they had just heard or medical fad. The genuinely religious had no such time for that foolishness. Their minds were never idle enough to entertain such stuff.

That’s the awesome lede in Jeremy’s review of Barton Gellman’s new biography of Dick Cheney,  Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, which he reviews in the Washington Times:

In politics, there is no such thing as a moral victory. Vice President Dick Cheney believes that to be the truth about power. Most of those people who go up against him do not. Thus, he has usually come out on top and left his opponents bloodied and bitter, or dangling at the end of a rope. That’s the hard lesson this reviewer took away from Barton Gellman’s excellent book, “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.”

“10 Newspaper Comic Strips That Need To F**king End”

At this point Snuffy Smith is like something drawn and written by aliens who have no concept of human life save what they’ve learned by watching Beverly Hillbillies reruns, and I believe it is mathematically possible to prove it is incapable of entertaining anyone, anywhere, at any time.

As Faulkner once said, “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.” But [Jill] Greenberg isn’t Keats, and bad art neither deserves nor receives the kind of moral pass that Faulkner was endorsing. An asshole who makes great art is an asshole who makes great art; but an asshole who makes lousy art is just an asshole.

– Novelist Jim Lewis, in a Slate.com essay commenting on photographer Jill Greenberg’s art.

In his latest Politico column Jeremy gets a just a little ahead of events, wondering aloud if Sarah Palin may try to undermine John McCain’s presidency and run against him in 2012:

If Sen. John McCain and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin manage to win this election for the Republicans, will they be fighting over the White House in four years’ time? That’s the question that occurred to me again and again as I thumbed through Kaylene Johnson’s slender biography, “Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned the Political Establishment Upside Down.”

Its portrait of Palin is quite flattering. Most controversies are dispatched with a few thin strokes. The final sentence has shades of that old George Washington cherry tree tall tale, thrown in for good measure. The young Palin, writes Johnson, “learned to work hard, stand up for herself and never tell a lie.”

However, it isn’t all flattering. Savvy readers might find cause for concern in Palin’s burning ambition, her ruthlessness or her complete lack of loyalty to political patrons. One sensible reason for Sen. Barack Obama’s not choosing rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as his running mate was the real worry that she would undermine and run against him. Palin has already done that to her patrons — twice.

It’s an intriguing notion and Jeremy makes a surprising compelling case for it. Having said that, I can’t help but wonder if he isn’t engaging in just a little bit of wishful thinking here. I can almost hear Jeremy saying, “Hey, a man can dream, can’t he?”

From Religious Intelligence comes this depressing-but-unfortunately-not-surprising story. It’s the little details that fascinate, like the second item I’ve highlighted:

The Iranian parliament has passed the first reading of a bill that imposes the death penalty on Muslims who convert to another faith. By a vote of 196 to seven, with two abstentions, the Majlis passed the “Islamic Penal Law” bill on Sept 9.

The law, which will now be referred to committee for final drafting and possible amendment, mandates the death penalty for male adult Muslims who convert to another faith. Women converts are to be jailed for life. Those who practice witchcraft will also be condemned to death.

Read more here. Okay, we already knew that the country was run by religious fundamentalist nutjobs. What I didn’t realize was that they were so nutty that they regarded Iranians practicing “witchcraft” as a major league problem. Perhaps J.K. Rowling should start watching her back.

Setting aside the whole Darwin/religion divide for the moment, you’ve gotta love the new attitude the Vatican is displaying:

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Vatican said on Tuesday the theory of evolution was compatible with the Bible but planned no posthumous apology to Charles Darwin for the cold reception it gave him 150 years ago.

Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s culture minister, was speaking at the announcement of a Rome conference of scientists, theologians and philosophers to be held next March marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s “The Origin of Species”.

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“Maybe we should abandon the idea of issuing apologies as if history was a court eternally in session,” he said, adding that Darwin’s theories were “never condemned by the Catholic Church nor was his book ever banned”.

Amen to that.

I am missing a couple of people. I mean, I am yearning for them to come and entertain me as they have done in the past. A bit to my surprise I am missing Hillary Clinton. I had got to the point with Hillary when I would smile as she came on my TV screen.

She was awful, but she was dependably awful. She was phony but she was so obviously and incompetently phony that you knew she’d never get anywhere much outside New York State, which is populated by morons and gangsters.

I miss Hillary. I miss those pop eyes of hers that gave her the permanent look of having just been goosed by somebody with very cold hands. I miss the glassy unconvincing smile and the bogus politician’s point. “Oh, hey, wow! Isn’t that Elvis in the third row down there?” I miss the pantsuits in colors that have no name. And, of course, I miss the laugh.

– John Derbyshire, from his Friday audiocommentary.