Wheat-dogg’s world
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It’s Feb. 29, the day the Gregorian calendar adds (almost) every four years to bring the calendar in line with the apparent motion of the Sun across the heavens.

Our calendar normally has 365 days in it, but the purpose of the civil calendar is partly to keep the equinoxes and solstices on the same days each year. Trouble is, the Earth takes a little more than 365 days to orbit the Sun, so over time the calendar “runs slow,” losing almost a day every four years. Since we can’t slow down the Earth in its orbit, the Gregorian calendar adds a day every four years to keep it in step with the Earth.

It’s not precise, actually. Earth refuses to observe our petty attempts at scheduling the solstices and equinoxes, and actually takes about 365.2422 days to orbit the Sun, instead of the more convenient 365.25 days. So the additional leap day every four years, over the course of 400 years, means the calendar would be about 3 days ahead of the Earth’s motion. The Gregorian calendar fixes that little detail by adjusting the add-a-day rule.

The rule is a bit obscure. It goes like this (sing along if you know the melody). Years that are divisible by 100 are also divisible by 4, so they would normally be leap years, as they were in the old Julian calendar. But we only apply the leap-day fix on those 00 years that are also divisible by 400. So, 1600 and 2000 were leap years, but 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not. So in the 400 years after 1600, the calendar “lost” 3 days — the right amount to keep it and the Sun in line with one another.

Sara Robinson has figured it out, and I agree. Barack Obama is leading the Democratic race because he has tapped into the public’s general malaise; Hillary Clinton has not.

Or to put it another way, Obama has soul.

Watching Obama’s rallies is a bit like watching a revival meeting or a really good concert. Whether he comes by it naturally or through a lot of coaching, Obama knows how to draw his audience into his message and how to reflect their thoughts and fears back to them. He has a vision, and people can see that. It’s been a long time since any candidate has had a sincere vision for the future of the country.

Meanwhile, Clinton, who is by no means a rank political amateur, has lost her momentum. Blame it on her campaign staff, or on her own starchy, politics-as-usual presence, she has lost her connection with “The People.” Her campaign appearances seem contrived, less spontaneous than Obama’s. Kinda dull.

Does Obama’s gift with an audience make him a better candidate for president? No. We should not elect someone on the basis of a “cult of personality.” We need to look at the candidates’ platforms, their specific proposals. Obama has been dealing primarily with overarching general themes, while avoiding any real specifics. It’s an old political ploy: speak a lot, without really saying anything. That way, no one can nail you later for not meeting your promises.

Ken Ham, the Aussie creationist that brought Kentucky the Creation Museum, has published a new book of lies that says the theory of evolution fuels racism and genocide.

Ham and his co-author-in-crime Charles Ware, president of Crossroads Bible College in Indianapolis, have written Darwin’s Plantation: Evolution’s Racist Roots, arguing that the theory inspired the Nazi belief in racial superiority and the despotism of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

“What Darwinian evolution did I would say is provide what people thought was a scientific justification for separation of races,” Ham said in an interview with the Associated Press.

Uhh, wrong … what weed are these guys smoking?

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species says nothing about the superiority of one human race over another. Social scientists and politicians warped Darwin’s idea of “survival of the fittest” to justify their abuse of power, but to blame Darwin for the Holocaust and Stalin’s purges is just a lie, plain and simple.

Rather than deal with evolution in an intelligent manner, Ham and Ware are throwing stones at biology’s underlying theory in an attempt to discredit it. Their hidden agenda is to associate evolution with racism so much that clueless school boards (like the one in South Carolina) will try to pull the teaching of evolution from science classes.

Charles McKinney, a South Carolina board of ed member, in fact used the same arguments that Ham and Ware recycle in their book during deliberations about the science curriculum in South Carolina. If evolution teaches that racism is OK, and we don’t want to teach racism in school, then evolution must be banned.

Well, with a name like Gooch, who can blame him for being touchy?

The lawmaker in question is Jim Gooch, a Democrat in the Kentucky House who tried to kill a mine-safety bill in committee last year. Editorial writers and cartoonists had a field day with Gooch, implying he was in cahoots with mine operators.
Cartoon by Joel Pett, Lexington Herald-Leader

Gooch was not amused, and in this session of the state house, introduced a bill that would reclassify editorial writers and cartoonists as “lobbyists” and not journalists, making it impossible for them to visit the House while in session.

This strategy is so wrong from so many aspects that one wonders how any lawmaker could be so dumb.

First, keeping journalists out of the House while in session (if it were legal) would not keep them from writing about the sessions. So Gooch’s stupidity could still be publicly aired.

Second, editorial writers and cartoonists are not lobbyists by any stretch of the imagination — who are they lobbying for? The readers, aka the voting public? I would say that’s a good thing, not a bad one.

Gooch told the Lexington Herald-Leader that editorialists were essentially lobbying for the mine-safety bill, which was eventually passed into law after public pressure made it all but inevitable.

Gooch said that he recognizes the role of journalists as government watchdogs and that he would be willing to change the legislation. But, he said, some Kentucky editorial writers and cartoonists essentially use their positions to lobby for or against legislation. He declined to name anyone in particular.

One of my least favorite candidates for president, Mitt Romney, all but called it quits today. That leaves the Republicans a simpler choice between moderate John McCain, whom I can actually tolerate, and conservative Mike Huckabee, whom I can’t.

Pundits figure McCain will now get the nomination, since he has more delegates now than Huckabee. McCain is also more electable than the born-again Huckabee, whose politics play well in the South and Midwest but would flop elsewhere.

Ever cagey, Romney has not completely pulled out of the race, but merely suspended his campaign, which means the 11 states and 294 delegates has so far are still technically his. He can use them in bargaining with McCain for policy concessions (or job placement in a Republican White House), so he stopped short of throwing his support behind McCain.

The GOP does not want a Democrat to win the November election, so despite all the conservatives’ misgivings about the Republican maverick McCain, it looks like they will swallow their pride and back him after all. The prickly McCain has refused to vote the party’s conservative line on many occasions, being more of a free-thinking Republican than a robotic lackey. I appreciate that trait, so I could actually accept the outcome if he wins the election (which I he doesn’t). He’d do a better job than W, that’s for sure.

Meanwhile, Huckabee is hanging on vainly to his distant third place. He hasn’t a ghost of a chance of winning the nomination, so I’m hoping that he will see the light soon and throw in the towel.

It’s not news that religion and politics have gotten mixed up with each other in the USA. It is remarkable, however, for someone to use his soapbox at a US mass-media website to question the advisability of mixing the two.

Commentator John Allen Paulos, an author and professor of mathematics at Temple University, imagines a panel pinning the candidates down on their views of God, religious tolerance, predestination, evolution and several other related topics. In real life, no one would ask these questions, and if they did, the candidates would dodge giving honest answers. Even Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, who wear their religions on their sleeves, are political enough to avoid saying too much in the middle of a tight race.

Read Paulos’ column, then check the comments. They range from the sympathetic to the outraged. Some folks are so touchy about religion that they apparently have missed his message.

Once upon a time, I would have agreed with Paulos wholeheartedly. Now I’m not so sure. We had a president not too long ago who sought advice from the stars (aka astrology) and one now who apparently believes his ascendancy to the White House was a gift from God. The religious right hijacked the Republican Party two decades ago and has quite effectively placed Christian extremists in several national offices, not the least of which is the presidency. (Former Secretary of the Interior James Watt believed so completely in the Second Coming that he saw no compelling reason to conserve our natural forests for later generations, for example.)