I've decided to merge my political bloggerating over onto my Dadmocracy comic site. There'll be a new comic once a week, but blog posts more often than that. Head on over to dadmocracy.com.

New Study Find Children Who Live with Biological Parents and go to Church Fare Best Developmentally (LifeSiteNews)

"A new study from the Mapping America project, co-released by more than 30 state family policy councils, has fund that children have fewer problems at school and home when they live with both biological parents and frequently attend religious services.

Dr. Nicholas Zill, the founding president of Child Trends, and Dr. Philip Fletcher, a research psychologist at Westat, co-authored the new study, which analyzes data from the National Survey of Children's Health.

Among their remarkable findings: children in this group are five times less likely to repeat a grade, less likely to have behavior problems at home and school, and are more likely to be cooperative and understanding of others' feelings. Parents of these children report less stress, healthier parent-child relationships, and fewer concerns about their children's achievement. These differences hold up even after controlling for family income and poverty, low parent education levels, and race and ethnicity."

Debra Saunders - "When the Warmest in History Isn't"

"When it comes to global warming, newspapers play up stories that reinforce the prevalent the-sky-is-falling belief that global warming is human-caused and catastrophic. But if a study or scientist does not portend the end of the world as we know it, it rarely rates as news...

No wonder, David Bellamy -- an Australian botanist who was involved in some 400 TV productions, only to see his TV career go south after he questioned global warming orthodoxy -- wrote in The Australian last week, 'It's not even science anymore; it's anti-science.' Bellamy notes that official data show that 'in every year since 1998, world temperatures have been getting colder, and in 2002 Arctic ice actually increased.' Exhibit B: Richard S. Lindzen, the MIT Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, recently wrote, 'There has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995.'

Such findings rarely are reported, even as, Marc Morano, communications director for the Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee told me, 'Scientists keep coming out of the woodwork' to challenge the so-called consensus. 'It's almost like a bandwagon effect.'"

Randall Hoven - "Making the World Safe for Marxism"

"It is almost commonplace to accuse someone of being like Hitler or acting Nazi-like. (Googling 'bush hitler' yields 1,300,000 hits, for example.) Yet you are considered beyond the pale, and possibly insane, to even suggest that someone might harbor Marxist sympathies. To question someone's dedication to traditional American or merely Western ideals = calling him communist = being Joe McCarthy = we now know you're nuts...

We are now at the point where any utterance at all that merely questions whether a politician leans Marxist is immediate grounds for dismissal, derision and even banishment from the Republican Party and the public conversation. It is 'McCarthyism' in reverse, or more properly, real McCarthyism as it actually happened, meaning the accuser is the one who suffers, not the accused.

But what if they are Marxist?

Excuse me, but isn't the great lesson we were supposed to learn from Nazism to recognize such evil before it reaches critical mass - to quash such movements before things get violent? As a reminder, the Holocaust count was 11 million; communism killed 100 million.

If we do not allow ourselves to call something 'wrong' or 'evil', we yield the battle without even a fight. Yet to refrain from such 'invective' is what is now called 'civil discourse' and the right 'tone.'"

How Obama Got Elected... Interviews With Obama Voters

Tolerance fails T-shirt test (Chicago Tribune)

"As the media keeps gushing on about how America has finally adopted tolerance as the great virtue, and that we're all united now, let's consider the Brave Catherine Vogt Experiment.

Catherine Vogt, 14, is an Illinois 8th grader, the daughter of a liberal mom and a conservative dad. She wanted to conduct an experiment in political tolerance and diversity of opinion at her school in the liberal suburb of Oak Park...

[J]ust before the election, Catherine consulted with her history teacher, then bravely wore a unique T-shirt to school and recorded the comments of teachers and students in her journal. The T-shirt bore the simple yet quite subversive words drawn with a red marker:

'McCain Girl.'

Immediately, Catherine learned she was stupid for wearing a shirt with Republican John McCain's name. Not merely stupid. Very stupid.

'People were upset. But they started saying things, calling me very stupid, telling me my shirt was stupid and I shouldn't be wearing it,' Catherine said.

Then it got worse.

'One person told me to go die. It was a lot of dying. A lot of comments about how I should be killed,' Catherine said, of the tolerance in Oak Park.

But students weren't the only ones surprised that she wore a shirt supporting McCain.

'In one class, I had one teacher say she will not judge me for my choice, but that she was surprised that I supported McCain,' Catherine said.

If Catherine was shocked by such passive-aggressive threats from instructors, just wait until she goes to college."

Michelle Malkin - "Hank Paulson, Naked Emperor "

"Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson finally confirmed what lonely bailout opponents tried to tell the American public all along: The man doesn't know what the hell he's doing.

Paulson held a bazooka to taxpayers' heads. He groveled on his knees in front of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He lured leaders from both political parties into linking arms in a panicked Chicken Little line dance for the beleaguered mortgage industry. Paulson demanded an unprecedented $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program for the good of the country. For the health of the housing market. For the survival of the economy. No time for deliberation. No time to review the failures of such interventionist approaches around the world. Now, now, now!

And now? The pulled-out-of-the-posterior '$700 billion' price tag has ballooned into the trillions. The 'mortgage industry rescue' has expanded to banks, insurance companies, automakers, credit card companies and possibly the entire national volume of consumer lending. Oh, and that vaunted 'TARP' component, Paulson admitted this week, is nothing but a four-letter word that rhymes with TRAP...

Paulson explained at his non-mea culpa press conference that he knew when the bailout was signed that it wasn't going to work as sold: 'It was clear to me by the time the bill was signed on October 3 that we needed to act quickly and forcefully, and that purchasing troubled assets -- our initial focus -- would take time to implement and would not be sufficient given the severity of the problem.'

Now he tells us? Would have been nice if he had made this clear -- quickly, forcefully and publicly -- to the Beltway stooges who were pulling the TARP over our eyes. So much for Paulson's earnest transparency commitments on the Hill.

Members of Congress who let themselves be bullied into switching their votes on the bailout should be experiencing the biggest case of buyers' remorse in U.S. history. They fell for what Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek called 'the fatal conceit' -- the disastrous idea that a federal bureaucrat has the knowledge to do a better job than the private market in organizing and directing an economy. They gave unchecked power to a single government official without a clue."

Astronomers capture first images of new planets (CNN)

"The first-ever pictures of planets outside the solar system have been released in two studies.

Using the latest techniques in space technology, astronomers at NASA and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used direct-imaging techniques to capture pictures of four newly discovered planets orbiting stars outside our solar system.

'After all these years, it's amazing to have a picture showing not one but three planets,' said physicist Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California.

'The discovery of the HR8799 system is a crucial step on the road to the ultimate detection of another Earth,' he said.

None of the planets is remotely habitable, scientists said."

Bailout Lacks Oversight Despite Billions Pledged (Wash. Post)

"In the six weeks since lawmakers approved the Treasury's massive bailout of financial firms, the government has poured money into the country's largest banks, recruited smaller banks into the program and repeatedly widened its scope to cover yet other types of businesses, from insurers to consumer lenders.

Along the way, the Bush administration has committed $290 billion of the $700 billion rescue package.

Yet for all this activity, no formal action has been taken to fill the independent oversight posts established by Congress when it approved the bailout to prevent corruption and government waste. Nor has the first monitoring report required by lawmakers been completed, though the initial deadline has passed.

'It's a mess,' said Eric M. Thorson, the Treasury Department's inspector general, who has been working to oversee the bailout program until the newly created position of special inspector general is filled. 'I don't think anyone understands right now how we're going to do proper oversight of this thing.'"