From Mark Shea

• Bottom line: Both parties are essentially about the acquisition and maintenance of power, and only secondarily about the common good. They are somewhat useful blunt instruments by which a Catholic, interested in the common good, can occasionally sting like a gadfly here or there and try to get the horse of the state moving in the right direction. But the notion that either party has in mind the interest of the ordinary person is sheer moonshine.
• Never ascribe to malice what can be sufficiently explained by ignorance.
• Tom Kreitzberg answers the religious challenge ‘these people aren’t smart enough to tell me how to live’: One of the keys to how the church understands herself: We don’t believe what the church teaches because church teachers are smart. Church teachers teach what was handed down to them by the apostles, and from all accounts the apostles were as sharp as a sack of wet mice.
• There’s Darwinism and then there’s the Darwin Mythos. My target is always the latter. In other words, there is the proposition of natural selection, which is basically common sense. Then there are the various vast and unwarranted metaphysical deductions, many of them extremely evil, which poltroons, bullies, atheist materialists, Nazis, and village atheists have drawn in constructing the Darwin Mythos.
• On the ‘stimulus’: from a sort of catechism? From Australia.
  
  Q. What is an Economic Stimulus Payment?
  A. It is money that the federal government will send to taxpayers.
  
  Q. Where will the government get this money?
  A. From taxpayers.
  
  Q. So the government is giving me back my own money?
  A. Only a smidgen.
  
  Q. What is the purpose of this payment?
  A. The plan is that you will use the money to purchase a high-definition TV set, thus stimulating the economy.
  
  Q. But isn’t that stimulating the economy of China?
  A. Shut up.