LEAVWORLD: GRAFFITI POLITTI

As a fan of Bill O'Reilly's, I'm not shy about "letting him have it," when I disagree with him. In that spirit, I sent him the following email: Bill, you're a pinhead for calling Adam Lambert "this gay guy." There's much more to him, so stop defining him by one "over the top" performance. The fascinating thing about "this guy" is the thousands of older women who turn into screaming "teeny-boppers" when they see him perform! I think Ms. Walters is secretly a "Glambert," as they call themselves. I kept it pithy, and tried to avoid bloviating, as any fan of "the Factor" knows to do, when emailing the show. However, I've been wanting to write about Adam for some time, well before the current AMA "controversy." O'Reilly's disparaging comments about him, while interviewing Barbara Walters last Wednesday night, seems to have given me the final bit of motivation I needed to actually ...

Well, this is an interesting story. The Swiss people, the ones who reflexively think of Americans as "bigots" or "racists," have just voted to ban "minarets" from being constructed on Mosques in Switzerland. Quel surprise! The polls said it only had 37% support, but it appears that people lied to the pollsters. We've been here before, and to see Switzerland going through this is dismaying. In a free society, any religion can build any place of worship they like, subject to secular/cultural legal codes. The cultural aspect is the most chafing, because people are attached to the architecture of their habitat. Some may see minarets as a physical threat to that part of their culture. Here in the US, there is no law against minarets. Muslims are free to build Mosques in any way they want, and they have. They have also adapted other buildings to this use, as all religions have done in this country. I understand that the Swiss don't have as diverse a popu...